Alum Benjamin Mako Hill 99F Awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award

Hampshire College alum Benjamin Mako Hill 99F, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award.

The NSF’s CAREER award is a prestigious grant that supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Hill’s research interests center around how the design of communication and information technologies shape fundamental social outcomes with broad theoretical and practical implications. Hill will use the five-year grant, totaling $549,959, to develop a general theory around the lifecycles and governance of digital knowledge commons and peer production communities.

Hill spent the 2018-19 academic year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and is a co-founder of the Community Data Science Collective, an interdisciplinary research group applying a range of quantitative and qualitative methods to the study of online communities.

Hill received his B.A. from Hampshire College and his Ph.D. from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the Media Lab.