From The New York Times
Cracking Teenagers’ Online Codes
By Pamela Paul
WITH her coordinated zebra-striped scarf, tights and arm warmers (arm warmers?), spiky out-to-there hat and pierced tongue, 34-year-old danah boyd provides an electric Gen Y contrast to the staid gray lobby of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Mass., which she enters in a flurry of animated conversation, Elmo-decorated iPhone in hand. In a juxtaposition that causes her no end of mischievous delight, her laptop bears a sticker of Snow White, whose outstretched arm gently cradled the Apple logo.
But Dr. boyd — a senior researcher at Microsoft, an assistant professor at New York University and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard — is a widely respected figure in social media research. With a number of influential scholarly papers under her name, she travels relentlessly, tweets under the handle Zephoria and has fans trailing her at TED conferences, at South by Southwest and elsewhere on the high-tech speaking circuit....
Despite her own teenage rebellion or perhaps because of it, Dr. boyd ended up at Brown, where she studied computer science, and at the Media Lab at M.I.T., where she got her master’s. She earned her Ph.D. from the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, working at Google, Yahoo and Tribe at the same time....