
APRON Collaborators
APRON includes Lab team members, faculty collaborators, and the APRON Advisory Board.
The Team

JOSHUA BARBOUR
Lab Director
Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin
Joshua B. Barbour (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is an associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Health Communication, a collaboration between the Moody College of Communication and Dell Medical School. He investigates how organizations design and discipline their communication to solve problems.

JARED JENSEN
Doctoral Student, University of Texas at Austin
Jared is a doctoral student in Organizational Communication and Technology at The University of Texas at Austin. His primary research interests involve the communicative dynamics between leadership, autonomy, creativity, and work. These topics have led to a variety of ambitious projects including a study of independent bands in the Austin music scene and another concerning issues of temporal power in an academic medical organization. Jared received his BA from Portland State University. He currently lives in Austin but still calls the Pacific Northwest home.

NANDINI SHARMA
Doctoral Student, University of Texas at Austin
Nandini is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin where she is in the Organizational Communication and Technology group. Her research explores how the nature of technology design, development, and architecture influences organizing and work processes. Currently, she is engaged in a project exploring the role that communicative affordances and constraints of software or code play in organizational meaning-making processes. In another research project, she is studying how critical and complex technologies are consequential for organizing in interdisciplinary contexts including scientific work, policy making, and technology design. As a part of APRON lab, she is conducting computational analysis of how the types of conflict of interest statements published in biomedical journals are associated with trial outcomes. Overall, her work draws from practice theory, demands mixed-methods analysis, and straddles interdisciplinary areas such as Language and Human-Computer interaction, Science and Technology Studies, and Digital Privacy Practices. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and motivated by her formal education in Computer Science and a decade of professional experience as an engineer in the software industry.

SHELBEY ROLISON
Doctoral Student, University of Texas at Austin
Shelbey is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, studying Organizational Communication and Technology. Her research explores how organizational members employ communication in order to navigate interdisciplinary collaboration, negotiate their professional identity, and represent knowledge in their day-to-day work practice. Her current project focuses on the complexities of coordinating knowledge-intensive, interdisciplinary work in a newly-founded academic medical center. Shelbey aims to conduct research which is both theoretically developmental to the field, as well as pragmatically valuable to the organizations she studies. In her free time, she enjoys making a mess of her kitchen and exploring Austin with her sweet dog.
Faculty Collaborators

TASHA DAVIS
Professor, Austin Community College
Tasha Davis (Ph.D., University of Texas) is a professor of Communication Studies at Austin Community College. Her teaching focuses on preparing college students for the workplace, and examining temporal issues in organizational structure and design.

REBECCA GILL
Associate Professor, Wake Forest University
Dr. Rebecca Gill (Ph.D., University of Utah) is the LeAnne E. Merlo Presidential Chair in Communications and Entrepreneurship at Wake Forest University. Her research is centered on organizational and occupational identity, with particular attention to entrepreneurial identity and how it is shaped alongside social identities, place, and culture. Gill’s recent scholarship examines the various elements of identity that may be involved in the formation of regional innovation ecosystems, and the implications thereof. She teaches courses that address entrepreneurial storytelling; entrepreneurial organizing; and critical theory. Her work has been published in several top tier journals, including Communication Monographs, Communication Theory,Human Relations, Management Communication Quarterly, and Organisation.

JEFFREY TREEM
Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Jeffrey W. Treem (Ph.D., Northwestern University) studies the relationship between technology use and social perceptions of expertise, primarily in organizational contexts. This research explores how communication technologies facilitate recurrent, interactive practices that affect attributions of knowledge individuals make regarding coworkers. Currently, Dr. Treem is pursuing two lines of research: the study of communication and expertise in knowledge-intensive and service-oriented work contexts, and investigation of issues surrounding the introduction of social media technologies into organizations. This work employs a variety of qualitative and quantitative analytical approaches including ethnographic methods and social network analysis.
Founding Students and Lab Alumni
In 2018, Anastazja Harris, Jared Jensen, Courtney Powers, and Kendall Tich, and Shelbey Rolison founded the Lab with Joshua Barbour. Their early input helped guide the Lab's mission and goals.
