Shelly D. Farnham

Biographical Statement The underlying theme to all my research is that we can meaningfully enable people to connect with each other via technology. Through my drive to have a real world, meaningful impact on people’s lives, as a research scientist I have worked primarily in industry research focusing on innovation in social technologies, including social networking, match-making, online communities, and mobile social coordination. My approach as both a social psychologist and a technologist is to first develop a deep understanding of natural social processes in any problem space, design innovation proposals based on my observations, prototype new technologies to test key research questions, and then deploy and evaluate said prototypes. I favor triangulating on research answers by combining diverse methodologies including usage analysis, online questionnaires, lab studies, and ethnographic observation. I received my Ph.D. in Social Psychology at the University of Washington in 1