
Dustin Palea
Ph.D. Student and Project Lead
UCSC - Tech4Good Lab
Dustin Palea is a rising fourth year Ph.D. student of Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz, where he is a member of the Tech4Good Lab. He also attended UC Santa Cruz as an undergraduate and received his BS in computer science in 2019. His research centers on scaling educational resources and opportunities to create a more equitable future of education. So far, this includes his work on developing exploratory reading groups for fostering exploration of computer science research and for establishing pipelines of undergraduates into research experiences; qualitative research that contributes a richer understanding of barriers to undergraduate participation in research from the perspective of computing faculty; and most recently, building systems that augment the teaching of qualitative analysis methods by harnessing data from a crowd of learners, enabling them to better learn from each other. Towards his dissertation, Dustin is interested in continuing in this direction by exploring novel ways of using crowdsourcing to help scale education.