Sociology * Software
I’m a student in the UW Sociology PhD program. My work is focused on understanding how social structures and culture shape feelings of compassion, animus and indifference to others. Under what conditions do those feelings translate into beneficial or detrimental action? How do institutions and markets amplify or inhibit the effects of those actions? My work on inequality in crowdfunding has been published in Social Forces, Social Science & Medicine and the American Journal of Public Health. Nora Kenworthy and I talked about our work on NPR Science Friday, and wrote an op ed in Scientific American. Our work was also covered in the New York Times. You can find my CV here.
I've recently started sciences.social where social scientists can do twitter-like communication without having to use the bird site. You can find me @markigra@sciences.social.
Prior to beginning my PhD, I had a long career in the software industry. I was a founder of LabKey Software, which provides data management software for life science. In 1999 I co-founded Westside.com and was VP of Products for a ground-breaking hosted web development platform. Westside was acquired by BEA Systems (later acquired by Oracle). I worked at Microsoft througout the 1990s on the VB and Microsoft Excel teams. Back in 1988 I co-wrote version 1.0 of EndNote reference software for a small company in Berkeley. EndNote is still being sold by Thomson Reuters over 30 years later, though I might try something more modern if I were you.
Now that my two sons have left the nest, I live with my wife in Seattle, where I demonstrate life’s futility by rooting for the Mariners and hoping for sunny days. I occasionally will post things on the internet, like this piece on Inclusion, and this one about my father's experience with child separation in Stalin's Soviet Union.