Draft:Beth E. Kolko

Beth E. Kolko is an American professor of human-centered design at the University of Washington and an entrepreneur. She has also worked as a venture investor. She is known as one of the first wave of academics who researched emerging Internet technologies, helping establish the academic field of Internet studies.

Education

She earned a PhD from the University of Texas Austin in 1994 and a Bachelor's degree from Oberlin College.

Early work on technology and society

Her co-edited book (with Lisa Nakamura), Race in Cyberspace was the first academic study to look at how issues of race played out in technology design and patterns of usage. She also co-authored (with Elizabeth Reid) one of the first critiques of online communities, a book chapter that demonstrated how the utopian discourse of early internet studies overlooked the realities of human behavior online and the way power imbalances in real life are replicated in online environments. In many ways, this work was a precursor to the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation online. She went on to publish dozens of articles, a textbook, and another edited volume Virtual Publics by Columbia University Press that examined aspects of digital identity, gender issues online, virtual communities, and technology and equity.

International technology and international development

In 2000, Kolko was a Fulbright Scholar in Uzbekistan, where she began a multi-year project investigating the emergence of the internet and mobile technologies in the Central Asian region. The Central Asia Internet and Communications Technology (CAICT) project ran until 2007, funded primarily by the National Science Foundation. Additional researchers on the project were Carolyn Wei, Emma Rose, and Erica Johnson who collaborated on multiple, publications and collaborations with colleagues in Computer Science at UW, primarily around the Starbus project. Cynthia Putnam did ground-breaking work with personas development as part of this project.

Global health research

The Mobile Midwives Ultrasound project, a collaboration with radiologists and computer scientists, was funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation via a Grand Challenges award, and by the General Electric Foundation.

Entrepreneurship

Kolko co-founded Shift Labs a start-up focused on creating solutions for low-resource contexts. The company created DripAssist an infusion rate monitor that is battery powered, gravity infusion device designed to work in areas where resources are scarce . The device is patented.