2017 September
I am Professor of Teaching of Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation at USC's Iovine Young Academy. I teach in the Academy (currently designing The Garage Experience) and in the Law School (teaching "Justice Innovation Startup Lab" and co-teaching Legal Design Lab). I retired this past June as professor of sociology and Lokey Chair in Ethics at Mills College in Oakland, California where I taught sociology and public policy and was involved with the data science and business programs and ran the innovation lab.
Other courses in my teaching portfolio include: Simulation and Modeling for Policy; Design Thinking in Higher Education; Geographic Information Systems; Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software; Research Methods in Anthropology and Sociology.
I started adulthood with a BA in mathematical, physical, and computer sciences; worked for a few years building financial software, and then started work on a PhD in sociology. By the time I'd finished it I'd made side trips into digital humanities, GIS, network analysis, data viz, and web-based data sharing.
My current mission is to pull together ideas from various strands of design thinking with insights from organizational science and social psychology to create pedagogy that effectively supports design-informed innovation and entrepreneurship education.