APRON Collaborators
APRON includes Lab team members, faculty collaborators, and the APRON Advisory Board.
The Team
JOSHUA BARBOUR
Lab Director
Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Joshua B. Barbour, Ph.D., a professor of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 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
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.
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.