Dr. Melissa Villa Nicholas is an assistant professor at UCLA's Department of Information Studies. Her first book, Latinas on the Line: Invisible Information Workers in Telecommunications (Rutgers Press), received an honorable mention from the Labor Tech Network book award for 2022. Her second book, Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry Around Immigrants, was released with UC Press and received the McGannon Center Book Award from Fordham University. Melissa has received the Diversity and Inclusive Excellence Awards at the University of Rhode Island, the Library Juice Press Paper Contest for her work on information and incarceration, and the Gender and Women’s Studies Smalley Fellowship for the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She is an affiliate of the Chicano Studies Research Center and DataX’s Data Justice and Critical Data Studies. Melissa has her Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
