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Antonina Bambina
  Antonina Bambina is a visiting scholar at The University of Reading, England. She has been working as an academic editor and a school governor. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at Columbia University in 2005. Her research interests include social network analysis, internet studies, and health. Bambina presented her research "The Influence of the Internet on Social Support and Health: Understanding an Online Cancer Support Group" at a CODES seminar on April 7, 2001. She held a number of leadership roles at Columbia including Chair, Interim Vice Chair and Sociology Representative for the Graduate Student Advisory Council and has served on several executive committees. Bambina received her B.A. from Queens College at the City University of New York and her M.A. and M.Phil. from Columbia University.
Adam L. Beckerman
 Adam
Beckerman is Web Project Engineer for the Center on Organizational
Innovation and for evolvenewyork.org. He is an experienced Web developer,
having managed the e-commerce sites for the Bloomingdale's retail
chain (http://www.bloomingdales.com) and Ermenegildo Zegna (http://www.ezegna.com).
Under Beckerman's direction and management of teams of up to 40 people,
the Web sites were honored with multiple awards, including Forbes.com's
Best of the Web commendations two years in a row for both sites. He
also has extensive business, marketing, programming, design, and technical
skills that enable him to be a natural Web projects leader for the
Center. Beckerman received his B.S. in Marketing from the University
of Maryland at College Park and is due to receive his MBA from Columbia
Business School in May 2004.
Daniel Beunza
 Daniel
Beunza is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and
Management at the Universitat Pompeu Fabraa in Barcelona, Spain. For
his doctoral dissertation, Beunza is examining the social determinants
of value in the financial markets. In one of his lines of research,
he looks at traders and asks the following question: given the availability
of good technology to trade stocks on-line, why do investment banks
still use trading rooms? To address that, Beunza examines the ways
in which spatial organization of trading allows modern investment
banks to gain an edge in arbitrage by developing mechanisms of distributed
cognition. He presented preliminary versions of this work: "Trading
Rooms as Interpretive Mechanisms," at the Consortium for Cooperation
and Competition in March 2000, Northwestern University, Illinois;
and at the Academy of Management Conference on August 2000, Toronto,
Canada. Beunza received his B.A. and M.Sc. in Economics at Universitat
Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, and worked as consultant in microeconomics
for National Economic Research Associates in Madrid. Beunza also organized
a conference on the Social Studies of Finance, sponsored by the Social
Science Research Council.
Juliet Cullen-Cheung
 Juliet
Cullen-Cheung is a Ph.D. student in Architecture at Columbia University
who works in the housing and community development field. Cullen-Cheung's
research interests include NYC's attempt to create digital districts
as community development agents, the interaction between the design
of virtual and real spaces of communication, and recently the intentional
community movement as innovative, participatory, grassroots reactions
to mainstream social, spiritual, and environmental degradation. Her
academic background includes anthropology, art and architecture. She
received her M.S. in Urban Planning from Columbia University.
Victor
Corona   
Victor P. Corona is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He received a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia and a B.A. in sociology from Yale. He is currently conducting research on creativity, careers, and organizational change in cultural industries.
Amanda K. Damarin
 Amanda K. Damarin is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the School of
History, Technology, and Society at Georgia Tech. Her research interests
center on change in micro-and mezzo-level mechanisms which organize economic
life, particularly with regards to work, technology, and inequality. Her
dissertation examines the occupational structures, labor market practices, and
career patterns which evolved in New York City’s new media industry from its
inception in 1993 through its early 2000s downturn. She has presented
findings from this research—including analyses of new media’s flexible
occupational structures, of its labor market networks, and of the distributed
ownership and control of new media technology and its consequences for workers—
in a variety of settings including meetings of the American Sociological
Association and Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. Damarin
received a B.A. in Social Science and Theatrical Design from Hampshire College.
Gali Einav
 In her current position as Director of Digital Technology Research at NBC
Universal, Gali overlooks consumer and market research on new digital and
interactive technologies such as DVR, VOD, Mobile and Broadband Internet
Previously, Gali worked at the Interactive Design Lab at Columbia University
researching the role and content of interactive technologies. Her
dissertation research looked at content and social implications of
interactive television in the US and in the UK. It took both an historical
and comparative look at the development of iTV and assessed possible
community building via interactive content. Her paper "The Content Landscape
of Internet Television" was published in "Television Over the Internet:
Network Infrastructure and Content Implications". Gali has worked as a
senior producer for the second TV channel in Israel and as a teacher of
media studies at the New School of Communications in Tel-Aviv. She has a
M.A. in Communications and Journalism from Hebrew University, Jerusalem
and a Ph.D in Communications from Columbia university.
Erzsébet Fazekas
Erzsébet Fazekas is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her doctoral dissertation examines the construction of institutions and the diffusion and recombination of cultural-cognitive items and organizational forms within the context of post-communist civil society development. Her research interests center on institutional entrepreneurship, discursive schemes and fieldwide organizations. She conducted extensive research on nonprofits and not-for-profit law in Eastern Europe and U.S. foundation grantmaking to Hungary. Fazekas received her B.A. in Literature and Linguistics from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, her M.A. in Sociology from the Central European University and her M.Phil. from Columbia University, and is to receive her Ph.D. in Sociology at Columbia University in the Winter of 2007.
Laura Forlano
 Laura
Forlano is a 1st year Ph.D. student in Communications at Columbia
University. Her research interests include communications technology,
organizational innovation and East Asia. More specifically, she is
interested in applications of new media and new organizational forms
that incorporate positive social outcomes into international communications
technology policymaking. Forlano is the Project Manager for the Information
Technology and Social Transformations program at the Social Science
Research Council. She is currently writing a chapter on "The Emergence
of Digital Government: International Perspectives" for Digital
Government: Principles and Best Practices. She is the Technology
Columnist for GothamGazette.com, a New York City news and policy
Web site. Forlano has consulted for international organizations including
the World Bank, International Telecommunication Union and United Nations.
She received her B.A. in Asian Studies from Skidmore College, a Diploma
in International Relations from The Johns Hopkins University School
of Advanced International Studies Bologna Center and her M.I.A. from
the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.
Barnabas GeroBarnabas Gero received his Ph.D. in Business from Columbia University. His research interests included strategic management, corporate governance, organizational innovation and private equity. Gero's dissertation focused on track records and the flow of deals in the New York private equity industry. Ning Gu  Ning
Gu is a Ph.D. student in Architecture at the University of Sydney,
Australia. His research on virtual architecture raises the question:
"Are 3D virtual worlds all we want?" Gu offers a model for representing
virtual architecture based on the structure of a functional core and
a visual shell. He develops a "place-centric" and "user-centric" approach
to this model. Gu is the co-author of a number of papers with Mary
Lou Maher including "Conceptual Competition ETH World Virtual and
Physical Presence" and "Visual Representation of Virtual Architecture."
He has a B.Arch. from Shenzhen University in China and a M.D.S. in
Design Computing from the University of Sydney, Australia.
John Kelly
 Marissa
King
  Kaja
Kuehl is a recent graduate from Urban Planning at Columbia University.
Her Master Thesis on "Interactive Spaces, -Wireless Communication
and the Public Urban Sphere" explores the potentials of wireless communication
systems to influence social behavior and physical urban spaces. Using
the New York City Subway System as a testing ground, she developed
a series of games, which create dependencies between virtual and physical
infrastructure within the city in order to establish new social spaces.
Her current research investigates the possibilities of wireless applications
as user generated information source using a peer-to-peer network
in physical space. Kaja has a Diploma in Architecture from the University
of Karlsruhe, Germany and works as an Urban Designer for the Department
of City Planning, NYC.
Dan Lainer-Vos 
Dan Lainer-Vos is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and the Ruth
Ziegler Early Career Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of
Southern California. His research interests include nationalism, science
and technology and economic sociology. Dan's research examines nation
building as a practical organizational accomplishment. Instead of
treating the nation as an abstract imagined community, Dan explores the
formation of transatlantic national networks by focusing on the
relationship between Irish Americans and Ireland and Jewish Americans
and Israel respectively. By examining instances of contacts between
diaspora groups and homeland communities, he traces the technologies and
discursive mechanism that enable these diverse groups to cooperate and
imagine themselves as members of the same nation.
Vincent-Antonin
Lépinay  Vincent-Antonin
Lépinay is completing his PhD in Economics at the CSI in Paris. He
has conducted fieldwork in a major French bank in order to understand
how innovations circulated in big financial corporations. It was also
a way to understand, from the inside, how markets were built and how
their building reshaped the organizations that performed them.
He was trained in science studies during his master, which he achieved
under the supervision of Bruno Latour at the EHESS.
After his PhD, he intends to study the market of eggs and sperm in
the USA and in France.
Alexandra Manske
 Alexandra
Manske studied Sociology and Political Sciences in Berlin, Germany
and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Technology and Science.
Her doctoral thesis focuses on new media workers in Berlin and examines
how web developers combine their private and professional lives in
such a way that each becomes a resource for the other. Based on qualitative
interviews, Manske examines how technical skills are supplemented
by a particular type of "life conduct" that is especially conducive
to gaining entry and professional advancement in the new media industry.
She was a Visiting Scholar at COI in the Fall of 2001, where she conducted
corresponding interviews with Silicon Alley web workers. Her papers
include "Wenn das Individuum zur Firma wird: Solo-Selbständigkeit"
and "WebWorker. Lebensstil als Ressource".
Paul-Brian McInerney
 Paul-Brian McInerney is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social
Informatics at Indiana University South Bend. He earned his PhD in
sociology from Columbia University in 2006. An original member of
the Center on Organizational Innovation, Paul-Brian's areas of
interest are economic and organizational sociology, science and
technology studies, and qualitative research methods. He has
conducted research on for-profit/nonprofit relations, civic
engagement and mobilization in institutionalized social movement
organizations, and technology in the nonprofit sector. His research
concerns how organizations express values through forms, practices,
and claims, which become conventionalized through field-level
interactions. Paul-Brian's current research involves the history of
a field of nonprofit technology consultants, the politics of open
source software, and hybrid organizational forms in the growing
social entrepreneurial sector. His publications include, "Technology
Movements and the Politics of Free/Open Source Software," forthcoming
in Science, Technology, and Human Values and "Geeks for Good:
Technology Evangelism and the Role of Circuit Riders in IT Adoption
among Nonprofits" forthcoming in Information Technology Adoption in
the Nonprofit Sector, Chicago, Lyceum.
Sophie Muetzel
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
My main research interest is the intersection between new technologies and old organizations, in particular in politics and the news media. I graduated with a PhD in Communications in 2010, and now work as a Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. One strand of my work consists of ethnographic participant-observation research focusing on the wider ramifications of political campaigns mobilizing people on a large scale to use personal contact as a form of political communication-what I call "personalized political communication"-working through things like canvassing and phone banking, and assisted by new social media and online-integrated database technologies. Another operates at a more institutional level and deals with the current convulsions in the commercial news business in much of the post-industrial world, confronted as it is with challenges rooted in long-term socio-political changes, technological challenges in the form of the rise of the internet, and cyclical problems related to the global recession. My work has been published in a range of academic journals, including New Media & Society, Journalism, and Journal of Information Technology & Politics-in addition I have presented it in newspapers articles, radio shows, television programs, and at several professional conferences. In past lives, I have been a bureaucrat, an editor, and a college instructor. I hold degrees from the University of Copenhagen (BA, MA), the University of Essex (MA), and have been a Fulbright-DAF student at the New School for Social Research. More information can be found at rasmuskleisnielsen.net.
Jeffrey Robinson
 Jeffrey
Robinson is Assistant Professor of the Stern School of Business at
New York University. He received his PhD in 2003 from Columbia University's
Graduate School of Business. His research interests include the role
of technology in the economic development of the inner city and the
implications of the "digital divide," cross-cultural organizational
behavior, nonprofit leadership and management, and social and organizational
networks. His dissertation explores entry barriers to inner city markets
and the business strategies used to overcome them. Robinson is Chief
Acceleration Officer of BCT where he assists with strategic planning
and supports the CEO and President with management and business development.
He has a B.S. in Civil Engineering and B.S. in Urban Studies from
Rutgers University and a M.S. in Civil Engineering Management from
the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Laura Sartori
 Laura Sartori took a Phd in Sociology and Social Research at the University
of Trento and is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at
the Bologna University . Her research interests include economic sociology,
consumer behaviour, local development and social capital, and new media.
More specifically, she is currently working on the social consequences of
the Internet: from digital to digital inequalities. She has just published a
book "Il divario digitale. Internet e le nuove disuguaglianze sociali" (The
Digital Divide. Internet and New Social Inequalities), Il Mulino, Bologna,
2006. Her publications include "Consumption on the Net" in Zappalŕ and Gray,
"Impact of e-Commerce on Consumers and Small Firms", London, Ashgate;
"L'altro Veneto: Politica e Sviluppo locale nel Polesine" in Sviluppo
locale, "Consumption in Affluent Societies of Industrialized Nations" and
"Consumption in Developing Countries" in the Encyclopedia of Life Support
Systems. She was a COI Visiting Scholar from August 2000 to July 2001.
Uri Shwed
 Greg Smithsimon
Ben
Stanley Zsuzsanna
Vargha |
Marissa
King is a first-year Ph.D. student in Sociology at Columbia University.
Her research interests include social movements, social networks,
and organizational behavior. More specifically, King is interested
in transnational interorganizational relations and institutional
reform. Her current research examines how Progressive era social
movements caused substantial shifts in the distribution of organizational
forms in the economy by promoting cooperative alternatives to
corporations. She received her B.A. in Sociology from Reed College.
Sophie Muetzel is Assistant Professor (wissenschaftliche Assistentin) in
the Social Sciences Department at the Humboldt-University in Berlin,
Germany. In 2002-2003, she was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman
Centre for Advanced Studies at the EUI in Florence, Italy. Her research
examines discourse as a principle medium in the construction of markets. In
her dissertation, she studied different forms of competition (narrative,
organizational, and stylistic) in the emergence of capital city journalism
in Berlin. Muetzel received her B.A. in Political Science from UC Berkeley,
her M.A. in Sociology from Cornell University, and her Ph.D. in Sociology
from Columbia University.
Greg
Smithsimon is a 5th year, dissertation-level Ph.D. student in Sociology.
He is currently completing a dissertation on institutions' and actors'
influence on the development and control of public space in New York
City, and the effect of privatization of public space on social conflict.
In addition, he is currently working on a study with Francesca Polletta
on the visioning workshops ImagineNY has organized on the WTC site,
and with William McAllister on cognitive mapping and New York neighborhoods.
Smithsimon's work which, includes research on transnational labor
organizing, has been published in Socialist Review, Radical Society,
Dissent and In These Times. He received his B.A. with honors from
Brown University in 1994.
Ben
Stanley is the Project Director for EvolveNewYork.org, a project
aimed at developing a web-based information resource to disseminate
information about non-profit organizations and government agencies
in New York City. He received his B.A. in Urban Studies from Columbia
College in December 2003. Stanley's academic interests include
organizational sociology, and the influence of associational life
on the American democratic process; the interwoven relationship
between human behavior, land-use patterns, political and cultural
boundaries, and democratic life; and the socially-dysfunctional
aspects of suburban geography and solutions presented by theories
of regional government. He completed a senior thesis in Urban
Studies in May 2003 entitled "Border Wars in a Regional Economy:
the social costs of interstate competition for economic development
in the New York City metropolitan area, and the argument for a
Metropolitan Business Assistance Authority".
Emmanuelle
Vaast is a doctoral student at the Centre de Recherche en Gestion
(CRG) of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, France. She will be a visiting
scholar at COI from June to August 2002. Vaast's research interests
include intranets, information communication technology practices
and organizational change, communities of practice, information systems
coherence and historical perspective on organizations and their management.
Her dissertation deals with intranet practices and the structure of
organizational boundaries and territories. Vaast is the author of
"Toward a new "genre" of management research? Research in management
with ICT and research on management with ICT" to be published in the
Revue Française de Gestion, "Intranets in French firms: evolutions
and revolutions" in Information Research, and "Intranets and
Organizational Hazards" in Réseaux. In 2001, she spent 3 months
as a visiting student at the Reginald H. Jones Center of the Wharton
School at the invitation of Professor Bruce Kogut, co-director of
this center. She received her first degree from Sciences Po, a Master
of Economics from Paris IX, an Agrégation Economie, ENS Cachan (Economie),
and a DEA Sciences de Gestion from Paris XII.
As a last-year PhD candidate, Joost is in the midst of wrapping up his dissertation, titled "Discursive Game Play: Games as Comm
unication." His academic work studies video games as an entryway into understanding contemporary media culture by exploring online communit
ies, game play and digital practices (e.g. modding). He is an affiliate researcher at the 
Zsuzsanna Vargha is LSE Fellow in Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia in 2010. Zsuzsanna's research interests include banking and finance, interactional and performative approaches to markets, organizational control, cultural professions and expertise, risk and calculation, consumption studies, and post-socialist Eastern Europe. Her article "Educate or serve: the paradox of 'professional service' and the image of the west in legitimacy battles of post-socialist advertising" was published in Theory and Society in 2010. Zsuzsanna's dissertation "Technologies of Persuasion: Personal Selling and the Making of Markets in Consumer Finance" explored the recent revival of face-to-face banking as the basis for understanding how market exchange unfolds at the boundaries of organizations, and how technological innovations such as Customer Relationship Management systems change the way consumers are assembled at the site of market exchange. Recently Zsuzsanna was invited to present the paper "Social Interaction as Market Device" at the ASA Special Session "Markets as social imaginaries." Currently Zsuzsanna is interested in consumer financial protection policy, in peer-to-peer social lending services, and in exploring the intersection of accounting, information technology, and marketing in financial organizations and markets.