ADVISORY BOARD

The MCDM program has an advisory board which offers career information, support for teaching, guest speakers, and research opportunities. The links take you to a short biography.

Kraig Baker

Kraig L. Marini Baker is the instructor for the MCDM law an policy classes. Kraig has been part of the MCDM faculty since the founding of the MCDM program. Kraig particularly enjoys trying to demystify the legal worlds of free speech, intellectual property, and privacy. Kraig is a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine, a large downtown law firm, where he serves as the chair of the firm's Technology, eBusiness, and Digital Media department. Kraig negotiates licenses and provides advice to clients in all aspects of digital media, including software and software and technology licensing, music, film, photography and other content licensing, and aspects of privacy, security, digital rights management, and advertising. Kraig's clients include large and small companies such as Microsoft, Nintendo, The Seattle Times, T-Mobile USA, E! Entertainment, TMZ.com, Getty Images, and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Kraig blogs when he can at dwtdigitalmedialawblog.com."  ^ Back to top

Jeffrey Barr

Jeff is focused on furthering awareness among software developers of the opportunity to innovate and build businesses using Amazon Web Services. Launched in July 2002, Amazon Web Services exposes Amazon.com technology and product data that enables developers to build innovative and entrepreneurial applications on their own.

Jeff meets regularly with developers in the U.S. and internationally to introduce Amazon Web Services and to help them build businesses and applications with the program's services. He joined Amazon in August 2002 as a Senior Software Developer on the Associates team. He has held development and management positions at KnowNow, eByz, Akopia, and Microsoft, and was a co-founder of Visix Software. He earned his bachelor's degree in computer science from American University and completed graduate work in computer science at George Washington University.   ^ Back to top

Cory Bergman

Cory is Director of Business Development at MSNBC.com, where he oversees web and mobile content, operations in Seattle. He is also founder and editor of LostRemote.com, a popular industry news/analysis site that reports on how technology is changing television, from the Internet to DVRs to VOD.   ^ Back to top

Jody Brannon

Jody directs new entry points to the MSN homepage and serves as ombudsman for Microsoft's portal. Her online career began in April 1995, when The Washington Post's Internet service, Interchange, was in beta, later becoming managing editor of washingtonpost.com and executive producer of WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive. Jody served as executive producer at USATODAY.com from December 2001 to July 2006. Previously she worked for U.S. News & World Report and The Seattle Times, her hometown paper.

She is on J-Lab's board for the Knight-Batten Awards and teaches in American University's interactive master's program. A forthcoming online news compilation will include an overview of her 1999 University of Maryland dissertation, "Maximizing the Medium: Assessing Impediments to Performing Multimedia Journalism at Three News Web Sites."   ^ Back to top

Kurt Buecheler

Kurt has pioneered seven early stage industries. At IBM, he led a PC channel sales team that grew its revenue to $465M. In 1992, Kurt helped start eShop and built the Internet's first graphical online shopping mall; eShop was acquired by Microsoft in 1996. Kurt built and ran Microsoft's largest Business Development worldwide team. He established over 2,500 partnerships and Microsoft industry leadership in Digital Media. He was president and CEO of The bEQUAL Company, which invented the DVD Game category and he has two patents granted and one pending. Kurt was VP Business Development for Xensource, which was acquired by Citrix. Kurt holds a B.S. in Managerial Economics from UC Davis.   ^ Back to top

Heidi Dahmen

For the majority of her career, Heidi has produced non-scripted, network prime time and cable television programs airing on ABC, CBS, FOX and USA, as well as UPN, E! Entertainment, TLC and TV Land. She's also produced for major television syndication companies including Disney's Buena Vista Productions, NBC Universal and Paramount Domestic Television. In addition to working in reality, talk, magazine, clip and documentary formats, she acquired and sold a life rights story which was made into an ABC television movie.

Heidi started her career at KOMO TV, the ABC affiliate in Seattle, producing live talk shows and special programming before being hired by Buena Vista Productions and moving to Los Angeles. She graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Communications and an emphasis on Broadcast Journalism, and is a member of the Writer's Guild of America, West.   ^ Back to top

Barry Devenney

Barry Devenney is a creative director and strategist focused on high production-value, innovative digital media. He is a founder of Seattle-based creative firm Barry and Greg Modern Media (barryandgreg.com), which works with partner clients Xbox 360, Getty Images, The Discovery Channel and Expedia on a wide range of broadcast, web, and environmental projects for multinational audiences. As a broadcast director, Barry won Emmy awards his documentary Taliesin: in the Tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as for The Operation, an open-heart surgery procedure broadcast live around the world.  ^ Back to top

Stanley Farrar

Stanley Farrar is executive producer of seattletimes.com. He is on the senior management teams of The Seattle Times newsroom and The Seattle Times Company New Media division, serving as liaison between the two for technical and advertising issues. He was part of the small team that created seattletimes.com in 1996 and served as its managing editor for eight years. He was an assistant managing editor at The Times, in charge of design, graphics, photography and newsroom technology. Previously he had been a newspaper photo/graphics director, a picture editor for the Associated Press and a news photographer.   ^ Back to top

Will Hodgman

Will is co-founder (2004) and chief executive of M:Metrics which measures consumer consumption of mobile content and applications. Prior to that he president and CEO of Sightward, Inc., a predictive analytics company. Before Sightward, Hodgman was executive vice president of NetRatings, provider of the Nielsen//NetRatings services, where he was responsible for the company's product offerings, sales, marketing, measurement science and business development. He came to NetRatings by way of Jupiter Media Metrix, where he served as president of measurement after Jupiter Media Metrix acquired AdRelevance, a company Will founded in 1998 to track data on online ad spending, placement and market share.    ^Back to top

Melissa Milburn

Melissa is responsible for media relations strategy and management for the foundation and its leadership team.

Prior to the Gates Foundation, Melissa founded a firm that provided strategic communications and media relations for private companies and non-profit organizations.  Before that, Melissa led the technology team at APCO Worldwide, where she and her team provided strategic counsel, corporate positioning, media training, crisis communications, and media relations for a wide range of public and privately-held clients. Prior to APCO Worldwide, Melissa worked at Waggener Edstrom, one of the world's largest high technology public relations firms and Microsoft’s agency of record.

Melissa's 12 years of television broadcasting experience includes anchoring, producing, reporting, writing, and editing for network affiliates representing ABC, NBC, and CBS.

She holds a BA in Communications from the University of Washington, and a Certificate in Public Relations for post-graduate work. She has won numerous awards for her work, including two Emmy Awards from the N.A.T.A.S. and a Totem Award from the P.R.S.A.

Robin Oppenheimer

Robin is an internationally-recognized media arts consultant, historian, curator, writer, and educator who has worked in the field since 1980. She was the Executive Director of 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle and IMAGE Film/Video Center in Atlanta, where she also directed the Atlanta Film & Video Festival.

In addition, she has produced numerous large-scale media arts projects, curated video art exhibitions and festivals, written about the media arts field, taught fundraising and media arts history and aesthetics, and established an Open Studio website training center for artists and arts organizations at the Seattle Art Museum. As the first (and only) Media-Arts-Historian-In-Residence at the Bellevue Art Museum in 2000-02, she researched and produced a TV show and exhibition about the history of the experimental Bellevue Film Festival (1967-81).

She also researched and helped produce the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) Reunion Symposium at the University of Washington in 2002 that brought together members of regional E.A.T. chapters in Seattle and Portland organized in 1967 with E.A.T. founding members Billy Kluver, Julie Martin, and Robert Whitman. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where she is researching the historical role technology plays in creative collaboration.  ^ Back to top

Marc Prager

Marc Prager has nearly 20 years of experience creating compelling content for broadcast, cable, film, corporate video, non-profits and the Internet. He joined TurnHere as its 3rd employee, where he developed and perfected its production model and built video product templates that helped take the company to a leadership position in Internet video. He serves as a mentor to many in TurnHere's network of independent filmmakers. As a member of TurnHere's executive team, he is involved in setting strategy for the company in the areas of quality assurance, product development, production and business development. Prior to joining TurnHere in 2005, Marc Prager was a show producer on two History Channel TV series, “Man Moment Machine” and “Tactical To Practical.” Previously, he worked at Pixar Animation Studios, where he managed the editorial department on the Academy Award-winning film “Finding Nemo.” He has also worked in network news in Nww York as a producer for NBC News Specials and for ABC News PrimeTime Live and World News Tonight. His international media experience includes high-profile television projects in Russia, Sri Lanka, Macedonia and Afghanistan. Marc received an MS from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley. ^ Back to top

Kevin Sites

Kevin has spent the past five years covering global war and disaster for several national networks. Sites helped pioneer solo journalism, working completely alone, traveling, and reporting without a crew. As a solo journalist ("SoJo"), Sites carries a backpack of portable digital technology to shoot, write, edit, and transmit multimedia reports. His past assignments have brought him to nearly every region of the world, including the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe. As Yahoo!'s first news correspondent, Sites will spend the next year covering every major global conflict for Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone on Yahoo! News. Kevin's controversial and award-winning war blog, www.kevinsites.net, was one of the first to combine text, digital images, and audio to provide readers with an intimate, behind-the-lines look at the war in Iraq and how it was being covered. In 2004, Sites was honored with the Payne Award for ethics in journalism for both his television and Web coverage of a mosque shooting in Iraq. He was also recently nominated for a national Emmy Award for the same story. Wired magazine named Sites as the recipient of their RAVE Award - the first ever for blogging.   ^ Back to top

Peter Wakim

Peter has 19 years of international business experience and currently serves as the Director, Business Development & Strategy, for Nokia focusing on T-Mobile USA. Joining Nokia in 2000, Peter directed a global reorganization of the International Transfer Platform and was a member of the Nokia Corporation HR steering group. In 2002, Peter transferred to the Nokia Ventures Organization, where he led an investigation into RFID technology, which ultimately formed a venture that commercialized the world's first RFID-reading cell phone. From 2003-07 Peter resided in Boston and established the Venturing group in the Americas.

Prior to Nokia, Peter worked for KONE Corporation, a global services and engineering company where he held a variety of positions located in Australia, Finland and for 3 years in mainland China as the companies Sales and Marketing Director during a green-field startup. Peter is often an invited speaker and chair at industry conferences on topics such as Corporate Venturing, Mobile Services and NFC technology. Peter earned an International Masters of Business Administration in Technology Management from Deakin University and a Bachelor's of Engineering in Electronic Engineering from the University of South Australia.   ^ Back to top

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