PROFILE

Tawfiq Ammari is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information. His advisor is Sarita Yardi Schoenebeck. He is a member of the Social Media Research Lab and the Michigan ICTD. He is also taking part in the Graduate Certificate program in Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Michigan.

He is a coorganizer of the student research group #Parenting, where they promote cross-disciplinary dialogue, information sharing, and collaboration between faculty and graduate students studying parenting.

He received his Master’s of Information from the University of Michigan School of Information in 2013 and was advised by John King. He received his B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Jordan Faculty of Engineering and Technology in 2009.

In the summer of 2017, he worked with Jofish Kaye at the Mozilla office in Mountain View, CA. In the summer of 2016, he worked with Stuart Schechter at Microsoft Research, Redmond.

His research interests are at the intersection of human computer interaction (HCI) and social computing. He has studied how parents, especially fathers, use social media sites to access information and social support. As fathers cope with changing social norms around parenthood, social media provides a safe space for them to communicate their frustrations and form communities. He has also studied how parents of children with special needs use social media and found that they access information and social support from other parents facing similar challenges.

His research process is to conduct formative studies using qualitative and quantitative methods typical in HCI research. To analyze the ways technology advances and social change interact, he draws on theories from Science Technology and Society (STS) studies. He then uses computational techniques like Machine Learning to test and refine his observations at scale. He hopes to continue in this line of inquiry to better understand how people get social support through social media when they face changing social norms and other social pressures.