I am currently a Ph.D. student at the UC Berkeley School of Information (formerly known as "SIMS"), supervized by Paul Duguid, AnnaLee Saxenian, Peter Evans and Coye Cheshire.

In my research, I focus on understanding the social processes in "peripheral" technical communities and the politics of foreign technical knowledge. My dissertation is based on an ethnographic study of software developers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In particular, I have been looking at the community formed around Lua - a programming language developed in Rio de Janeiro that has been recently gaining in popularity. During my free time, I work on Sputnik - a wiki written in Lua, which I started as a part of my participant observation and now maintain as a hobby.

As of August 2007 I am back in the United States from my second round of fieldwork.

Recent and Upcoming Presentations and Papers

• "Jeeks: Developers at the Periphery of the Software World", the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, NY, August 10-17, 2007.

• "Using Foreign Forums", Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40), Waikoloa, Hawaii, January 3-6, 2007.

• "Technology and Identity in Brazilian Software Industry: what is Brazilian about 'Software Brasileiro'?", 2nd Conference of Brazilian Studies in Northern California, Moraga, California.

• "Foreign Knowledge in the Work of Brazilian Software Developers," CSCW Doctoral Colloquium, November 4, 2006.

• "Decaying into the Global: Construction, Decay and Re-configuration of the Brazilian Computer Industry," Society for Social Studies of Science, Vancouver, November 2-4, 2006 (Sectiont: "The Will of Science and Technology in States of Decay", Thursday 3:30-5:30pm)

• "Foreign Knowledge in the Work of Brazilian Software Developers," i-Conference Doctoral Colloquium, November 4, 2006.

• "Online Journaling as a Federated Community of Practice," American Sociological Association, Montreal, August 11-14, 2006.

• "Reading the Free Manual: Foreign Knowledge in the Work of Brazilian Software Developers," Informatics Goes Global, Bloomington, Indiana, March 3-5 2006.

• "Googling across the Equator," unpublished paper.