Kambiz Ghozati served as a research assistant in the Department of Information Systems at UMBC. The research by Dr. Jennifer Preece and Kambiz has focused on analyzing the communication content of bulletin board, Listservs and UseNet communities. Kambiz currently works at Westat, Inc., in Rockville, MD.

Dr. Jonathan Lazar completed his doctoral studies in the Department of Information Systems at UMBC . With Dr. Jennifer Preece, Dr. Lazar has created a taxonomy for classifying online communities, and has researched analysis and design issues in online communities. Dr. Lazar has published a number of papers related to online communities. Dr. Lazar is currently interested in research methods and techniques for evaluating networked resources.

Blair Nonnecke is a research assistant in the Department of Information Systems at UMBC. He and Jenny Preece are researching how people participate in online communities. The primary focus is on lurkers - their activities, strategies, tactics, and sense of community - with the goal of developing metrics and improving communities and tools for lurking.

Dick Seabrook is a Ph.D. student, working with Dr. Preece. He is also an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Anne Arundel Community College. He is developing automated techniques for recognizing empathic messages and exchanges in online communities by non-subject terms and discourse characteristics.

Dorine Andrews is a doctorate student in communications design at the University of Baltimore. Her research focus is on the usability and sociability issues surrrounding the design of online communities for people resistant to online relationship building. Specifically, she is working with mid-life career changers who actively use the Internet to gather information and email, but do not use synchronous or non-synchonous discussion forums.

Diane Maloney-Krichmar is a Ph.D. student at UMBC in Language, Literacy and Culture. Diane is doing an ethnographic case study to understand why a particular online community is not functioning well. She expects her findings to help improve the community's usability and sociability.

Zhensen Huang is a doctorate student in the Department of Information Systems at UMBC. He is interested in online communities in electronic commerce environment. He is researching the usability and sociability issues in existing commercial online communities.