IDRE welcomes six new board members this year. They will contribute to IDRE’s mission by providing vision, oversight, and strategic planning for advanced digitally-enabled research and education, and by representing the faculty voice in innovative, computationally-intensive research at UCLA.
About the Members:
Martha Bailey
Martha Bailey is a professor of economics at UCLA and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Dr. Bailey’s research focuses on issues in labor economics, demography and health in the United States within the long-run perspective of economic history. Her work has examined the implications of the diffusion of modern contraception for women’s childbearing, career decisions, and the gender gap in wages. Her recent projects examine the short- and long-term effects of Great Society programs. She has written numerous articles and co-edited two books, Legacies of the War on Poverty and A Half Century of Change in the Lives of American Women.
Dora L. Costa
Dora L. Costa is Kenneth T. Sokoloff professor of economic history where she teaches economic history and health economics. She is also a research associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) programs on the Development of the American Economy and on Aging and the director of the NBER working group cohort studies. Dr. Costa’s research focuses primarily on issues in labor economics, demography, and health, as interpreted over the long span of American economic history. Her work has covered a wide range of topics, including retirement, elderly living arrangements, determinants of older age mortality and morbidity, long-term trends in the health of the population, trends in leisure, Consumer Price Index bias, and social capital.
Jungseock Joo
Jungseock Joo is a professor of communications at UCLA whose research is aimed at understanding verbal and non-verbal human communication in mass media and its effects by scalable, computational, and data-driven approaches. A big challenge in modern media studies lies in the sheer amount of data in various forms and multiple modalities. To quantitatively characterize communicative activities in this space, Dr. Joo uses automated or semi-automated methods that scale indefinitely. In particular, his research emphasizes the visual dimension of human communication, to understand how we communicate via visual means such as facial expressions or gestures using images or videos. He develops state-of-the-art computer vision and machine learning techniques to automatically recognize contents from large-scale visual data.
Raymond Knapp
Raymond Knapp is a professor of musicology and humanities, and has served twice as chair of the department (2006-09 and 2013-16). He has also served the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music as academic associate dean, and is currently director of the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities. Dr. Knapp has a broad interest in classical and contemporary music, and has authored 5 books, including the award-winning The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (2005) and, most recently, Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism (2018). At UCLA since 1989, Dr. Knapp is well known for his commitment to undergraduate education, having chaired the Academic Senate’s Undergraduate Council, General Education Governance Committee, and College Faculty Executive Committee. Dr. Knapp comments on his new role on the IDRE board, “while I’m a bit of an old dog in the arena of digital research and education, I’m eager to learn new tricks and perhaps come up with a few of my own.”
Robert Lucero
Robert Lucero joined the UCLA School of Nursing as associate dean for equity, diversity, and inclusion; professor of nursing; and the inaugural chair in diversity, equity, and inclusion, Adrienne H. Moseley. His research focuses on enhancing the quality of care for hospitalized older adults and improving self-management of chronic health conditions among Hispanic, African-American, and LGBTQ+ populations. Dr. Lucero has nearly 50 peer-reviewed publications and has been awarded approximately $15 million in extramural funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) as principal investigator. He comments on his new role on the IDRE board, “as a nurse and health services and health informatics researcher, I am excited to join the IDRE board to share and learn from colleagues about possibilities for utilizing non-traditional sources of health care data to characterize and identify health care complexity more fully.”
Victoria Vesna
Victoria Vesna is an artist and professor at the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and director of the Art|Sci center at the School of the Arts and California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI). Although she was trained early on as a painter at the Academy of Fine arts, Belgrade, her curious mind took her on an exploratory path that resulted in work that can be defined as experimental creative research residing between disciplines and technologies. With her installations, Dr. Vesna investigates how communication technologies affect collective behavior and perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. Her work involves long-term collaborations with composers, nano-scientists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, and she brings this experience to students.