News/Research

Announcing our 2016 Undergraduate Cohort

22 Nov, 2016

Announcing our 2016 Undergraduate Cohort

We are proud to welcome an amazing set of undergraduates from across campus to the Berkeley Center for New Media. These students highlight the interdisciplinary nature of new media through the range of disciplines they represent and the exciting collaborative projects in which they are engaged. We are fortunate to count such an exceptional cohort among our community.

Howe Cui

Howe (Computer Science) is an officer in VR@Berkeley and is spearheading a research project dedicated to advancing storytelling in 360 film. As part of this project, Howe and the VR team are hoping to develop 360 Projection as a prototype for immersive theater, thereby extricating VR from headsets. Working with an interdisciplinary team of students from Film & Media and Computer Science, the team has taken a theatrical understanding of environment in order to stage scenes in this mode. Howe has also served at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science.

Ian Erickson

Ian (Architecture) is particularly interested in scale and medium, in how the pervasive digital conventions of squeezing, scrolling, and zooming, produce a contemporary lived experience which puts traditional notions of scale in crisis. Precisely because digital technology has become so essential in our production and understanding of the world, Ian hopes to consider the digital as a medium. During his time at the Center for New Media I am excited to apply an architectural lens to these and other fundamental tensions of new media. Ian has been part of the Fung Fellowship for Technology and Wellness, working in research and development on virtual and augmented reality, big data, and mapping. At the Cal Poly Design Village competition, Ian led a team to receive an Honorable Mention.

Kojin Glick

Kojin Glick is pursuing a double major in Political Science and Media Studies, and is primarily interested in the intersection of organizational politics and online communications and media. At the Berkeley Center for New Media, he hopes to continue his passions for multi-mediated and networked online spaces with an emphasis in online community organizing.

Jocelyn Hsu

Jocelyn Hsu is a 4th year Public Health major who aspires to use media and technology to better educate communities about health hazards and prevention tools. She fell in love with story telling through photography in an introductory journalism class in high school, and found herself back in the world of media when she co-founded Spoon University at Berkeley in her first year at UC Berkeley.

Shangjun Jiang

Shangjun Jiang is a senior double major in Statistics and Media Studies, with a minor in Education. She originally comes from Qingdao, China. She's passionate about technology, storytelling, and design. After exploring different fields, she found her future goal as a data scientist specializing in data visualization.

Stacy Kellner

Stacy Kellner is a senior studying Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley. Within the major, she is especially interested in consciousness, perception, and self-concept unity. She is currently completing an Honors thesis on self-concept clarity and self-concept fragmentation, and hopes to continue research abroad before pursuing graduate studies in Human-Centered Design/HCI.

Emily Liu

Emily is a third year Sociology major and Creative Writing minor at UC Berkeley. Her childhood love of storytelling has grown into a ever-growing fascination with new mediums to express a voice or message - whether for a person, organization, or corporation - and she looks forward to exploring media as it develops to meet the needs of an increasingly technological world.

Vivian Liu

Vivian Liu (Cognitive Science and Computer Science) has been proactively pursuing her research interests in cultural data and human-computer interaction through graduate courses, including Tangible User Interfaces and Making Sense of Cultural Data. She is piloting workshops at a local library on STEAM, teaching kids about recursive art/fractals and bio-inspired design. Vivian has worked on multiple new media data projects and excels at data analysis.

Sarah Marshall

Sarah (Media Studies) is interested in semiotics and what it means to understand and interpret signs via the language and images present in media. She enjoys studying art and language and wants to better understand from a critical standpoint how these components interact to create messages- specifically in the advertising industry. Sarah has interned in digital media in several firms, including Saatchi & Saatchi in LA.

Allison Nguyen

Allison Nguyen is currently a junior at UC Berkeley, pursuing a degree in Media Studies. Prior to attending Berkeley, she lived in the same house her entire life in Orange County. She grew up with not only her parents and older brother, but also surrounded by her aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. Allison hopes her involvement in the Berkeley Center for New Media will help her in her pursuit to undertake a career in public relations in the entertainment industry.

Advaita Patel

Advaita is a sophomore majoring in computer science and is passionate about design. Being a T-shaped designer, hacker and visual artist, she wants to create work that reflects the society’s needs. She uses the design thinking process to innovate products. Currently, She is working on Carpt, a car platform technology that converts a human driven car into an autonomous car to aid the car transition period for Ford Motors. She is also working on a Samsung sponsored wearable device to increase safety for joggers and bikers at night.

You can view her work at www.advaitapatel.com

Sarah Weinstein

Sarah Weinstein is a third year undergraduate majoring in computer science. As she enjoys uniting technological and creative disciplines, studies in new media are a great way for her to explore interdisciplinary interests. She has a passion for the impact that technology makes globally and its power to bring people and their ideas together. Sarah loves the innovative and exploratory approach of BCNM courses, and looks forward to continuing to work with staff and fellow students.

Carmen Zheng

Born and raised in Oakland, CA, Carmen Zheng is a senior double majoring in Media Studies and Business Administration. She is active on-campus as President of the UC Berkeley Social Media Advisory Team, where she works with the university's Social Media Director in running Berkeley's official Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat accounts. Carmen is an undergraduate researcher at the Haas School of Business, a member of Kappa Alpha Theta Fraternity, and a Fiat Lux full-ride Scholarship recipient. She is particularly interested in the power of media in redefining the public sphere amidst a digital age where public versus private civil discourse is being blurred by Internet technologies. In the near future, she plans to pursue graduate school for Media Studies and wants to bridge the gap between her current two fields of study by bringing media research into the business world.