People

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People

Principal Investigators

  • Perry Deess is the Director of Institutional Research, New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has primary responsibility for data processing, survey implementation, theoretical background, and editing.
  • John Gastil is Head and Professor in the Department of Communication Arts & Sciences at The Pennsylvania State University. He oversees every aspect of the project and is the principal author of many writings emanating from it.
  • Cindy Simmons is a Senior Lecturer in the College of Communications at The Pennsylvania State University. She shares responsibility for analyzing the legal/historical context of this research, and she coordinated many of the qualitative interviews used in this project.
  • Phil Weiser is Dean of the University of Colorado Law School. He shares responsibility for analyzing the legal/historical context of this research.

Co-Authors

  • Kent Anderson is a senior lecturer on the Faculty of Law at the The Australian National University. He and Mark Nolan have written about citizen participation in the Japanese justice system.
  • Laura Black is an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University. Her dissertation examined how storytelling shapes identity and manages conflict during public deliberation. She helped create the national dataset for this project.
  • Stephanie Burkhalter is an assistant professor in political science at Humboldt State University. Her dissertation examined the structural conditions and practices that promote and inhibit deliberation in the U.S. Congress. She helped create the national dataset for this project.
  • Paula Consolini is the Coordinator of Experiential Education at Williams College. She conducted what may be the first test of Tocqueville’s ideas about the civic impact of jury service in her 1992 doctoral dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley.
  • Hiroshi Fukurai is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California-Santa Cruz. He studies the American jury and Japan’s jury innovations.
  • Alevtina Gall is an undergraduate at the University of Washington. She served as a research assistant on both the NSF project and the national dataset project, and she is studying the small but significant effect of jury orientation on jurors’ readiness for service.
  • Andrea Hickerson earned her PhD in communication at the University of Washington and is an assistant professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her work looks at deliberation, diversity, and diasporic media.
  • Jordan Larner conducted a series of qualitative interviews for her senior honors thesis at the University of Washington in the Department of Communication. Her research involved interviewing jurors regarding the connection between jury service and other civic activities.
  • Colin Lingle is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication. His principal areas of interest include political blogging, the dynamics of independent and corporate media, climate change communication and film.
  • Jay Leighter is an assistant professor at Creighton University, having earned his PhD in communication at the University of Washington. Jay served as the principal research assistant on the NSF-funded portion of our project in 2004.
  • Mark Nolan is a senior lecturer on the Faculty of Law at the The Australian National University. He and Kent Anderson have written about citizen participation in the Japanese justice system.
  • Leah Sprain earned her PhD at the University of Washington and is an assistant professor at Colorado State University. Her dissertation studies meetings of a Nicaraguan Fair Trade coffee cooperative. She is writing on the qualitative experiences of jurors.
  • Mike Xenos is an assistant professor in communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research looks at deliberation, voting, and new media. He focuses on how different electoral information environments shape how citizens arrive at political opinions and voting decisions.

NSF Expert Panel

The following individuals provided valuable feedback on the early stages of this project.

  • Valerie Hans, Professor, Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice.
  • Reid Hastie, Professor of Behavioral Science, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
  • Dick Madsen, Professor of Sociology, University of California at San Diego.
  • Kay Schlozman, J. Joseph Moakley Professor of Political Science, Boston College.