Bio

Hello! My name is Megan Finn and I am an Associate Professor at American University’s School of Communication where I teach classes on Media, Technology and Democracy. I can be reached by email at finn at american dot edu. I am also an Affiliate Associate Professor at University of Washington in the Information School.

For 9 years, I was a professor at University of Washington’s Information School. I was a faculty member of the DataLab at the iSchool, and an affiliate of the UW’s eScience Institute, where, as a part of the Data Science Studies group, I co-convened a talk series, “Data Then and Now” from 2019-2021. I was an advisor with my university’s Science, Technology and Society Studies (STSS) program where I was lucky enough to advise incredible students from Forestry, Law, and Urban Planning. I was fortunate to supervise Meg Young, now a researcher at Data and Society.

In 2022-2023 I was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society and Stanford’s Department of Communication and HAI. In 2021-22 I was a Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

From 2012-2014 I spent two wonderful years as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, MA with the Social Media Research Group.

I completed my PhD in 2012 at UC Berkeley’s School of Information where Paul Duguid and AnnaLee Saxenian were my PhD advisors and Peter Lyman advised my masters degree, also from Berkeley. My dissertation committee members also included Richard Walker and Coye Cheshire. My dissertation research was funded by National Science Foundation Dissertation Grant. Previously, I spent three years working as a engineer and research engineer at HP. I  B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from the LSA Honors College.