CDSC Welcomes Dionna, Loizos, and Thaty!

We’re excited to welcome Dionna Taylor, Loizos Bitsikokos, and Thaty (pronounced Tatchi) Andrade Nunes as new core student members of CDSC!

Dionna is a first year MA/PhD student in the Communication Department at the University of Washington, being advised by Mako. She earned her B.A. in Psychology and Communication (also from UW) and is interested in the intersection of human behavior and technology, with a primary focus on online community collapse and online healthcare spaces. In her free time, you can find her reading, line dancing, or traveling.

Loizos is a PhD student at Purdue University’s Brian Lamb School of Communication. His academic journey began with degrees in physics and applied mathematics from the National Technical University of Athens (N.T.U.A.), followed by an MA in computational social science from the University of Chicago, focusing on sociology. His research lies at the intersection of computational social science, online platforms, and organizations. He’s particularly interested in the intricate relationship between algorithms and society. He also studies the tensions between structure and agency within online platforms, examining how platforms influence identity formation and whether users can resist institutionally ingrained biases. His work investigates the conceptualization of desire within platform infrastructures. When he has free time outside of academia, Loizos enjoys writing poems, making and collecting zines, watching cinema, taking photographs, walking in nature, and occasionally playing the saxophone.

Thaty (pronounced like Tatchi) is a first-year PhD student in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University, advised by Professor Aaron Shaw. Her interest in studying online communities began while working at game companies in South Korea. In addition to creating social media videos, she was responsible for organizing engaging community events and managing online communities. She was fascinated by how quickly these communities could self-organize, whether by creating guides, wikis, or establishing their own rules and moderation systems. Thaty wants to investigate how communication and information technologies influence social outcomes, how online communities influence participants, what kind of participants (lurkers or active) join them, and why and how they contribute. She’s also interested in the different forms of community engagement such as collaboration, political mobilization, and organization. She’s originally from Brazil, lived in South Korea for seven years, and speaks Portuguese, English, Korean, and some Spanish! In her free time, she enjoys playing story-driven video games, watching horror movies/series, and spending time with friends