took a different route to get into academia. Academia is my second career. I had about a 20 year career in industry before I came into academia. And so most of my background in industry I mean, I've done every job from an entry level database developer through a CTO of a very large government agency. And I think that what really drove me into academia is that it is part of my my career. I did an awful lot of consulting work and training, and I really once, once I pushed more into the sea level management, I started to really miss that personal connection, the training, and then the other thing I really missed about consultancy was being able to pick and choose the projects that I was really interested in and to be able to solve those problems creatively. And as I thought more about it, academia just sort of became a new, interesting option, right? So I didn't really start my PhD until I was 46 years old, and so I was much late as much later in life, and as a result, I feel like I've been able to draw fairly heavily on my my business experience in business background, which I hope makes me a better not only teacher but also a better researcher, because I have a pretty good understanding of how things work in terms of, you know, practicality and and applications of of research concept. So that's kind of how I got to where I am today.

sure So method a logically my my background experience is primarily in data and analytics. And so a lot of my research interests really revolve around those concepts. I really have a strong interest in the idea of digital persuasion. How we can use, uh, digital resource is whether it be online forums, whether it be, you know, even in text and images for persuasive purposes. And so a lot of my research revolves around that As an example, I just completed a paper that was published a couple weeks ago by I S J. Uh, that was really with some really good researchers that was focused on the idea of using general systems theory to identify characteristics of I t. Artifacts that better frame i t n I s research. And you know what I brought to the table on that was being able to use natural language processing for topic modeling of existing papers to be able to extract ideas and information about how current research is working on how well it really adheres to this. This basic model eso that's that's kind of what I do. It's it's really all about understanding how to use digital resource is for the purpose of persuasion and and hopefully help people understand the world that they live in a little bit better.

That's a good question because obviously I try to develop ideas of my own. And then obviously I interact with other researchers that have very good ideas as well. Um, I think that really comes down to no, my ability to be able to apply my methods to the problem effectively. That's really probably the most important thing, but also in terms of collaboration, I think it's really important to make sure that you can assemble a team of collaborators where you each have complementary experience. You know, if you are working with a collaborator, that you and that collaborator sink really well in terms of your background and experience, and it may seem like a natural thing. It may seem like a positive, but in reality what happens is you tend to start thinking along the same lines. You may not necessarily start getting creative in terms of of your backgrounds and that sort of thing. So I think, um, Mawr important than the actual ideas. I think it's the team that you set up the collaborators that you work with and making sure that you're all really complimentary. And so I think that probably one of the more important things, Andi. Why? I would choose toe work with someone or a group of people is a complementary skills and, uh