Dr. Celeste Campos-Castillo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University. She has co-authored with high school, undergraduate, and graduate students on research about how technologies shape health and health care outcomes. She regularly publishes in journals within the fields of data science, health policy, medicine, psychology, and public health. Her PhD is in Sociology from the University of Iowa and she completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at Dartmouth College.

Jeff Siarto is a Professor of Practice in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University and currently serves as the Interim Director of the MSU User Experience (UXMS) program. He focuses on user-centered design and applied UX education, guiding students to think critically about usability and accessibility. As the lead of the Design & User Experience (DUX) Lab, he mentors interdisciplinary student teams working on real-world projects. Within the VIP program, he supports DUX teams by shaping design workflows and fostering collaborative, human-centered solutions. His leadership bridges academic learning with practical UX practice.

Dr. Grosch is a research computing facilitator at ICER and works to make research computing more accessible. His background is in applied mathematics and computer science, and his Ph.D. research is in developing fast and provably correct algorithms for solving high-dimensional problems. He is very excited to start a new research direction in sustainable computing!

Dr. Betsy Sneller is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures. She is a director of the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab and the lead investigator for the MI Diaries project. Dr. Sneller’s primary research interest is in language variation and change, particularly phonological change (how people’s mental representation of speech sounds changes over the generations).

Dr. Suzanne Evans Wagner is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures. She is a director of the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab and the co-lead investigator for the MI Diaries project. Dr. Wagner’s primary research interest is in language change across the lifespan and how it intersects with language change in communities over time.

Mengyan Ma is an Assistant Professor (Professor of Practice) in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at Michigan State University with an active research agenda. Before rejoining MSU, she served as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire from 2021 to 2024. Her research examines the intersection of health, technology, and family communication using mixed methods approaches. As principal investigator, Mengyan received a Trifecta Grant to support interdisciplinary research on influencer marketing of cannabis-infused beverages, with the goal of informing media literacy campaigns, family education, public health initiatives, and regulatory discussions. Her scholarship has been published in journals including Telemedicine and e-Health, International Journal of Communication, Social Media + Society, Health Communication, Journal of Family Communication, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, and Journal of Advertising Education, among others.

Dr. Dirk Colbry is a Senior Specialist in the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering at Michigan State University. He has a background in computer science with expertise in machine vision, pattern recognition, and scientific image analysis. His work emphasizes developing computational tools that support interdisciplinary research across science and engineering domains. Dr. Colbry leads the SEE-Insight Lab, guiding research on exploratory and intelligent image understanding. In this role, he also mentors students and researchers while shaping the lab’s research direction and collaborative culture.

The Zarnetske Spatial and Community Ecology Lab (SpaCE Lab) uses a combination of observational data, experiments, and statistical and theoretical modeling to connect observed patterns of biodiversity and community composition with underlying mechanisms across local to global scales. We aim to understand and predict how the composition and geographic distributions of species and ecological communities are affected by biotic interactions, species invasions, biophysical feedbacks, geodiversity, climate change, and land-use change. A central goal is to understand which species and ecological communities are most sensitive and/or resilient to climate change, and in turn act as 'biotic multipliers' of climate change through their outsized impacts on ecological communities.