Andrés Monroy-Hernández is a social computing researcher at Microsoft Research and an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. His research focuses on the design and study of social media systems. In particular, he is interested in peer-production, creative online communities, remixing, and civic media.
Andrés holds a PhD and a Masters from the MIT Media Lab focused on Human-Computer Interaction. He was advised by Mitchel Resnick, his committee members included Yochai Benkler, Robert Miller, and Tim Berners-Lee. He is an alumnus of the Oxford Internet Institute’s summer doctoral program and holds a Bachelors in Electronic Systems Engineering from Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico.
As part of his research at MIT, he created the Scratch online community, a website where millions of young people program, share, and remix video games and animations. Also at MIT, he was one of the founders of Sana, a mobile health care system for the developing world. Before pursuing his doctoral degree, he was one of the software developers for SFX, an OpenURL link server, and for the Los Alamos National Lab, where he helped create MyLibrary, a personalized library web portal.
Andrés' work has been awarded at Ars Electronica and the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition. In 2012, he was named one of Boston’s emerging leaders by the Boston Business Journal. He has held fellowships from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Samsung, the Bradesco Foundation, and Telmex.
Andrés has published for a variety of journals, edited volumes, and presented at conferences, including Communications of the ACM, Interactions, American Behavioral Scientist, and the conferences on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI), Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), Creativity and Cognition (CC), Interaction Design and Children (IDC), Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), Web Science, American Educational Research Association (AERA), and South by South West (SXSW). Andrés also writes opinion pieces and offers expert commentary for news outlets including the New York Times, CNN, Wired, NPR, Technology Review, ReadWriteWeb, and others.
