Teaching Team
Maneesh Agrawala
Maneesh Agrawala is the Forest Baskett Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford University. He works on computer graphics, human computer interaction and visualization. His focus is on investigating how cognitive design principles can be used to improve the effectiveness of audio/visual media. The goals of this work are to discover the design principles and then instantiate them in both interactive and automated design tools. He received an Okawa Foundation Research Grant (2006), an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2007), an NSF CAREER Award (2007), a SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award (2008), a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009), and an Allen Distinguished Investigator Award (2014).
R.B. Brenner
R.B. Brenner is a Lecturer in the Department of Communication and managing director of the Stanford Journalism and Democracy Initiative. He returned to Stanford in 2018 after four years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a tenured full professor and director of the School of Journalism. He had been a Stanford Lecturer from 2010 to 2014.
R.B.’s teaching is informed by his three-decade career as a reporter and editor. He held several prominent editing positions at The Washington Post, including Sunday Editor and Metro Editor. He was one of the primary editors of The Post’s coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2008, and played a leadership role in merging the digital and print newsrooms.
He has been a consultant for two journalism-themed films: “The Post” (2017) and “State of Play” (2009). A graduate of Oberlin College, R.B. began his reporting career in North Carolina and also worked at newspapers in California and Florida.
Steve Henn
Steve Henn is an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford University. He is passionate about using technology to reach new audiences and support business models that enable rigorous, in-depth journalism.
In 2016 Steve co-founded 60db, a podcast platform and recommendation engine that was acquired by Google. Before that Steve spent years working as a public radio reporter and a senior correspondent at NPR, Planet Money, and Marketplace. Reporting gave Steve the chance to cover Washington DC’s lobbying industry, private military contractors, work and family issues, child labor, and the technology industry’s growing role in reshaping our society.
Serdar Tumgoren
Serdar Tumgoren is a Lecturer of data journalism in the Department of Communication and associate director of Big Local News, a nonprofit platform that provides public data to journalists.
He is passionate about open source tools and platforms that help journalists uncover data-driven stories. He co-founded the OpenElections project, a volunteer effort to gather and standardize U.S. election data, and created datakit, a customizable tool to help journalists simplify and standardize data analysis workflows. Before joining Stanford in 2018, Serdar worked as a data journalist at The Associated Press, The Washington Post and Congressional Quarterly.