Danah boyd

danah boyd (stylized in lowercase, born November 24, 1977 as Danah Michele Mattas) is a technology and social media scholar. She is a partner researcher at Microsoft Research, the founder of Data & Society Research Institute, and a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University. Boyd grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Altoona, Pennsylvania. According to her website, she was born Danah Michele Mattas. After her parents' divorce, in 1982, she moved to York, Pennsylvania, with her mother and her brother. Her mother married again during danah's third grade and the family moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She attended Manheim Township High School from 1992–1996. She used online discussions forums to escape from high school. She called Lancaster a "religious and conservative" city. Having had online discussions on the topic, she began to identify as queer. A few years later, her brother taught her how to use IRC and Usenet. Even though she thought computers were "lame" at the time, the possibilities for connecting with others intrigued her. She became an avid participant on Usenet and IRC in her junior year in high school, spending a lot of time browsing, creating content, and conversing with strangers. Though active in many extra-curricular activities and excelling academically, boyd had a difficult time socially in high school. She assigns "her survival to her mother, the Internet, and a classmate whose misogynistic comments inspired her to excel." Once she reached college, she chose to take her maternal grandfather's name, Boyd, as her own last name. She decided to spell her name in lowercase so as "to reflect my mother's original balancing and to satisfy my own political irritation at the importance of capitalization." Her initial ambition was to become an astronaut but after an injury, she became more interested in the Internet. Boyd initially studied computer science at Brown University, where she worked with Andries van Dam and wrote an undergraduate thesis about how visual depth cues in a virtual 3D environment affect depth perception.