Morana Alac, Assistant Professor of Communication and Science Studies

alac@ucsd.edu

Personal web page: http://hci.ucsd.edu/morana/

Ph.D. in Semiotics, University of Bologna (2002)

Ph.D. in Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego (2006)

Morana Alac conducts ethnographic research of scientific laboratories and other settings of technology production and use. She works with video to focus on the dynamics of embodied social interaction.

Alac's main project regards laboratories of cognitive science, neuroscience, and robotics. She is interested in how scientists learn about human thinking and behavior by employing new technologies -- social robots, motion-capture systems, face recognition, and functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Morana Alac: "From Trash to Treasure: Learning about the Brain Images through Multimodality", Semiotica, 156-1/4, 2005, pp. 177-202.

Morana Alac: "Negotiating Pictures of Numbers", Journal of Social Epistemology, 18:2, 2004, pp. 199-214.

Morana Alac & Edwin Hutchins: "I See What You are Saying: Action as Cognition in fMRI Brain Mapping Practice", Journal of Cognition and Culture, 4:3, 2004, pp. 629-661.

Morana Alac teaches classes on human-technology interaction, discourse analysis, and communication theory.