I don't honestly remember when I first decided I wanted to be a professor. I remember thinking as a kid that having the summers off forever was an awesome idea, of course, but it wasn't until I was older that I discovered the joy of getting up in front of a room full of people and making them as excited about something as I was. I love showing people how amazing these subjects can be, batting ideas back and forth and getting them engaged in real conversations about fascinating topics.

I completed my Bachelor's Degree from Kenyon College in 2000, double-majoring in English and Philosophy with concentrations in Creative Writing and the Integrated Program in Humane Studies, Kenyon's then-experimental digital humanities program. I completed my Master's Degree in Comparative Media Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007, and my PhD in Media Arts and Practices from the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts in 2018.

Over the years, I've held leadership positions at MIT's Convergence Culture Consortium, the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab and World Building Media Lab. Most recently I've been involved in Whittier College's Digital Liberal Arts program, advised students in its student-customized Whittier Scholars program, and helped Whittier students secure internships in the media industries.

In short, I love teaching, learning what my students want to do and how I can serve as an accelerator to help them get there. I also love collaborating with others operating at the intersection of academia and industry, working to find insights into how arts and technology intersect, where entertainment and technology co-evolve, and working to disseminate those insights as broadly, accessibly and as engagingly as possible through both publications and lectures and presentations.

The primary focus of my research is the future, or futures, of storytelling. The breadth of this research is reflected by the different places you can put the emphasis on the key syllables in that phrase.

I research the future of storytelling, as I explore what new stories emerge as primary components of our culture, what we called cultural touchstones back at Microsoft. What makes a particular story or storyworld like Star Wars or The Avengers resonate with mass audiences? How do they change over time? How can storyworlds be designed to have significant cultural impact – and be conscious of the "with great power comes great responsibility" aspect of pop culture?

I also research the future of storytelling, exploring how new media are created and refined, how the affordances of multiple media evolve and change, and how new kinds of storytelling are enabled by such new platforms. I especially focus on the fields of worldbuilding and comparative media studies, as I believe that as all media become increasingly digital the term 'transmedia' will yield to just media, with disparate story components like books and movies and TV shows and so on being connected on the backend with intelligent systems, and the experience changing as that system learns more about what resonates the most with each individual audience member.

Perhaps most importantly, I research the future of storytelling as I focus on emerging best practices by storytellers working in cutting-edge platforms and environments like those mentioned above, the business models they use to not just survive but thrive making the kinds of work they love, and work with the next generation of storytellers and worldbuilders to set them up to succeed in that future.