So like many people, I had a winding road to get to my PhD. I didn't start out thinking I wanted a PhD. I was actually working in the IT industry, getting my MBA part time and you know I had made kind of an off the cuff remark to a faculty member, and she also made kind of an off the cuff remark back of have you thought about being, have you ever thought about being a scholar or getting your PhD, and it was really this one faculty member reaching out to me and making kind of a comment of me saying you know early on in my career, I thought I wanted to be interested in research. I thought I was going to work at the Center for Disease Control. I thought I was gonna be an epidemiologist, and that's just not where life took me. It took me to IT, but then when I talked to her, she's like have you ever thought about researching IT? There could be a lot of value to that. If you've always been this kind of curious person to do research, maybe you should think about that as your career and so as I was thinking about where my career was leading me and realizing it wasn't work that was fulfilling and it wasn't really meeting my goals and my interests, I really started to think that maybe there's something to this idea about getting a PhD, so it really was just one faculty member having the right comment at the right time that put me on an entirely different path where now I have a PhD and now I'm a scholar.

So I have a lot of research interests. There're a lot of things that fascinate me. But I think most of the themes of those types of questions are things that are very practically based. They have relevance to things that I experienced when I was working prior to getting my PhD so I started off having an interest in IT project management because I started off as a consultant for a big portion of my early career. And realizing all of the problems that were repeated time and time again. I wanted to find ways to try to address some of those problems or understand why they happen. And I still do research and project management. But I've brought in my perspective through interactions with other faculty, with senior scholars. I early on, started researching information systems' success and how do we evaluate systems? And as I've moved on beyond that research, I'm now more interested in the impacts of information technology. But I study impacts of information technology at all different levels to the individuals to teams to organizations to society. So my most exciting research that I'm doing right now is related to online gaming, and I know a lot of people are interested in things like addiction and the negative impacts of games. But I'm interested in some of those positive outcomes of games. So how might we use online gaming to build skills for career development? How might we use online gaming to understand how people behave and interact with other individuals in an online environment ? How do we take gamification to a deeper level than just leaderboards and badges? How can we really involve the user? What are the downsides if we involve the users using gamified approaches, so I tend to try to find things that are relevant and interesting based on my past experiences. But I tend to do a lot of different types of research that all relates to these impacts of IT.

So that's a great question, and I think sometimes ideas come through conversations. They come through just moments of reflection while driving or while cooking or doing something else completely different. But it's, sometimes it comes from interacting with other colleagues where you have these opportunities to gain insights as you have conversations. Sometimes it's colleagues, bringing me ideas and asking how might we turn this into something that can be useful and valuable, So I think ideas come from a lot of different sources, but then the question is trying to decide what do I work on. And so when I choose a project because there's so many projects I want to do, I could look at my white board in front of me and see a lot of projects I want to do. But when I choose which project I'm gonna work on, I think about different things like what might be the impact of that research and who might be the audience, which is the most feasible actually to accomplish? I've had some great ideas, but they're not really ready yet, the field is not ready, the research methods aren't ready, it is just not the right timing for it. So it's trying to find the right projects to do at the right time with the right colleagues that are available at the right time. And it's these blend of things that help me figure out what projects I want to pursue.