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MCDM Advisory Board

The MCDM program has an advisory board which offers career information, support for teaching, guest speakers, and research opportunities. The links take you to a short biography.

Jeffrey Barr

Jeff is focused on furthering awareness among software developers of the opportunity to innovate and build businesses using Amazon Web Services. Launched in July 2002, Amazon Web Services exposes Amazon.com technology and product data that enables developers to build innovative and entrepreneurial applications on their own.

Jeff meets regularly with developers in the U.S. and internationally to introduce Amazon Web Services and to help them build businesses and applications with the program’s services. He joined Amazon in August 2002 as a Senior Software Developer on the Associates team. He has held development and management positions at KnowNow, eByz, Akopia, and Microsoft, and was a co-founder of Visix Software. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science from American University and completed graduate work in computer science at George Washington University.

Cory Bergman

Cory is Director of Digital Media at KING TV, NWCN, where he oversees web and mobile content, operations, business development as well as digital strategies for Belo Corporation in Seattle. He is also founder and editor of LostRemote.com, a popular industry news/analysis site that reports on how technology is changing television, from the Internet to DVRs to VOD.

Jody Brannon

Jody directs new entry points to the MSN homepage and serves as ombudsman for Microsoft's portal. Her online career began in April 1995, when The Washington Post's Internet service, Interchange, was in beta, later becoming managing editor of washingtonpost.com and executive producer of WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive. Jody served as executive producer at USATODAY.com from December 2001 to July 2006. Previously she worked for U.S. News & World Report and The Seattle Times, her hometown paper.

She is on J-Lab's board for the Knight-Batten Awards and teaches in American University's interactive master's program. A forthcoming online news compilation will include an overview of her 1999 University of Maryland dissertation, "Maximizing the Medium: Assessing Impediments to Performing Multimedia Journalism at Three News Web Sites."

Kurt Buecheler

Kurt has pioneered seven early stage industries. At IBM, he led a PC channel sales team that grew its revenue to $465M. In 1992, Kurt helped start eShop and built the Internet's first graphical online shopping mall; eShop was acquired by Microsoft in 1996. Kurt built and ran Microsoft's largest Business Development worldwide team. He established over 2,500 partnerships and Microsoft industry leadership in Digital Media. He was president and CEO of The bEQUAL Company, which invented the DVD Game category and he has two patents granted and one pending. Kurt was VP Business Development for Xensource, which was acquired by Citrix.  Kurt holds a B.S. in Managerial Economics from UC Davis.

Heidi Dahmen

For the majority of her career, Heidi has produced non-scripted, network prime time and cable television programs airing on ABC, CBS, FOX and USA, as well as UPN, E! Entertainment, TLC and TV Land. She's also produced for major television syndication companies including Disney's Buena Vista Productions, NBC Universal and Paramount Domestic Television. In addition to working in reality, talk, magazine, clip and documentary formats, she acquired and sold a life rights story which was made into an ABC television movie.

Heidi started her career at KOMO TV, the ABC affiliate in Seattle, producing live talk shows and special programming before being hired by Buena Vista Productions and moving to Los Angeles. She graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Communications and an emphasis on Broadcast Journalism, and is a member of the Writer's Guild of America, West.

Barry Devenney

Barry Devenney is a creative director and strategist focused on high production-value, innovative digital media. He is a founder of Seattle-based creative firm Barry and Greg Modern Media (barryandgreg.com), which works with partner clients Xbox 360, Getty Images, The Discovery Channel and Expedia on a wide range of broadcast, web, and environmental projects for multinational audiences.   As a broadcast director, Barry won Emmy awards his documentary Taliesin: in the Tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as for The Operation, an open-heart surgery procedure broadcast live around the world.

Scott Ehrlich

Scott has more than a decade of top-tier television and Internet management experience. He has managed teams of more than 200 people and has been responsible over the past 6 years for the buying and selling more than $200MM in digital content in addition to numerous high profile strategic deals. He is widely recognized as a leader in the creation and distribution of digital media products.

Scott Ehrlich founded and served as the managing partner in Impulse Media, a Seattle based digital business consulting company and Red Tie, Inc., a development company with offices in New York and Seattle. Through Impulse Media, he has served as a consultant and advisor to senior management at Sony Pictures Digital Networks, Rivals.com, Infospace, Disney/ABC Digital Media Group, Navio Systems, DivX Networks, iFilm (now part of MTV Networks, Inc.), Lightningcast, Rhythm Networks, BBC and Microsoft.

Stanley Farrar

Stanley Farrar is executive producer of seattletimes.com. He is on the senior management teams of The Seattle Times newsroom and The Seattle Times Company New Media division, serving as liaison between the two for technical and advertising issues. He was part of the small team that created seattletimes.com in 1996 and served as its managing editor for eight years. He was an assistant managing editor at The Times, in charge of  design, graphics, photography and newsroom technology. Previously he had been a newspaper photo/graphics director, a picture editor for the Associated Press and a news photographer.

Will Hodgman

Will is co-founder (2004) and chief executive of M:Metrics which measures consumer consumption of mobile content and applications. Prior to that he president and CEO of Sightward, Inc., a predictive analytics company. Before Sightward, Hodgman was executive vice president of NetRatings, provider of the Nielsen//NetRatings services, where he was responsible for the company’s product offerings, sales, marketing, measurement science and business development. He came to NetRatings by way of Jupiter Media Metrix, where he served as president of measurement after Jupiter Media Metrix acquired AdRelevance, a company Will founded in 1998 to track data on online ad spending, placement and market share.

Mary Lockhart

Mary is Senior Policy Officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, using her background in broadcast journalism and innovative story telling to develop a multimedia educational center about the challenges the foundation is working to address.

Before joining the Gates Foundation, Mary spent 18 years as a journalist for NBC and CBS News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. She has been nominated for seven Emmys and won four, including Outstanding Interview, Breaking News, Outstanding Background/Analysis, and recognition for her coverage of the events of September 11, 2001. She traveled extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia, did news bureau tours in Moscow and London, and spent a year at the University of Michigan Law School as a Knight Wallace Fellow.

Throughout her career, Mary has covered a wide range of topics, producing stories that help viewers feel connected to large international issues, and worked to shine a light on stories the traditional news media doesn't typically cover. She is a member of the Director's Guild of America and a graduate of Smith College, and she has a Parson Russell Terrier named Rosie.

Tina Mankowski

Tina is the new director of UW Medicine/Health Sciences News and Community Relations. Her office provides news and community relations service to the UW health sciences schools, the School of Medicine, UW Medical Center, and Harborview, as well as faculty spread among several sites in the Puget Sound area. Mankowski serves as the key spokeswoman for UW Medicine and health sciences for major media events at the local, national, and international levels. Tina previously served as director of Community Relations at Harborview Medical Center for 20 years.

Assunta Ng

Assunta is publisher and founder of Seattle Chinese Post, the first Chinese newspaper in the Pacific Northwest for half a century, and the Northwest Asian Weekly, the only English-language Asian weekly in the Northwest, both since 1982.  Two years after founding these newspapers, she was selected for Esquire Magazine's The Best of Men and Women under 40. An entrepreneur and civic leader advocating for Asian Americans, women of color, and youth, her other awards and recognitions include the 2001 Citizen of the Year Award from Municipal League of King County, the 2001 Asian Pacific American Women’s Leadership Institute’s National Summit Heroine Award, the 2000 Distinguished Service to Journalism Award from Society of Professional Journalists, the 1998 University of Washington Alumni Association's Multiculturalism award, and the 1995 Seattle Times 100 most influential people in Washington state list.

Robin Oppenheimer

Robin is an internationally-recognized media arts consultant, historian, curator, writer, and educator who has worked in the field since 1980. She was the Executive Director of 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle and IMAGE Film/Video Center in Atlanta, where she also directed the Atlanta Film & Video Festival.

In addition, she has produced numerous large-scale media arts projects, curated video art exhibitions and festivals, written about the media arts field, taught fundraising and media arts history and aesthetics, and established an Open Studio website training center for artists and arts organizations at the Seattle Art Museum. As the first (and only) Media-Arts-Historian-In-Residence at the Bellevue Art Museum in 2000-02, she researched and produced a TV show and exhibition about the history of the experimental Bellevue Film Festival (1967-81).

She also researched and helped produce the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) Reunion Symposium at the University of Washington in 2002 that brought together members of regional E.A.T. chapters in Seattle and Portland organized in 1967 with E.A.T. founding members Billy Kluver, Julie Martin, and Robert Whitman. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where she is researching the historical role technology plays in creative collaboration.

Kevin Sites

Kevin has spent the past five years covering global war and disaster for several national networks. Sites helped pioneer solo journalism, working completely alone, traveling, and reporting without a crew. As a solo journalist ("SoJo"), Sites carries a backpack of portable digital technology to shoot, write, edit, and transmit multimedia reports. His past assignments have brought him to nearly every region of the world, including the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe. As Yahoo!'s first news correspondent, Sites will spend the next year covering every major global conflict for Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone on Yahoo! News. Kevin’s controversial and award-winning war blog, www.kevinsites.net, was one of the first to combine text, digital images, and audio to provide readers with an intimate, behind-the-lines look at the war in Iraq and how it was being covered. In 2004, Sites was honored with the Payne Award for ethics in journalism for both his television and Web coverage of a mosque shooting in Iraq. He was also recently nominated for a national Emmy Award for the same story. Wired magazine named Sites as the recipient of their RAVE Award - the first ever for blogging.

Peter Wakim

Peter has 19 years of international business experience and currently serves as the Director, Business Development & Strategy, for Nokia focusing on T-Mobile USA. Joining Nokia in 2000, Peter directed a global reorganization of the International Transfer Platform and was a member of the Nokia Corporation HR steering group. In 2002, Peter transferred to the Nokia Ventures Organization, where he led an investigation into RFID technology, which ultimately formed a venture that commercialized the world's first RFID-reading cell phone. From 2003-07 Peter resided in Boston and established the Venturing group in the Americas.

Prior to Nokia, Peter worked for KONE Corporation, a global services and engineering company where he held a variety of positions located in Australia, Finland and for 3 years in mainland China as the companies Sales and Marketing Director during a green-field startup. Peter is often an invited speaker and chair at industry conferences on topics such as Corporate Venturing,  Mobile Services and NFC technology. Peter earned an International Masters of Business Administration in Technology Management from Deakin University and a Bachelor's of Engineering in Electronic Engineering from the University of South Australia.