About

Hi! I’m Dr. Samantha Shorey, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the department of Communication.

I’m a social scientist and design researcher who studies the impact of automation, AI and robots on workers and workplaces. My field-based research projects help us better understand how communication about innovation—the way we talk about emerging technologies in the media and with each other— shapes how they are designed, implemented, and used in organizations. I seek to highlight overlooked stories of ingenuity by on-the-ground workers, recognizing the essential role of their labor to building and sustaining technological systems.

I’m currently a 2026 panel member of the AI100: Stanford’s 100 year study of AI. And, in 2025 I was a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute where I advanced policies to support the workforces that make, implement and maintain AI technologies.

Before I joined Pitt, I was an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of UT’s ethical AI research initiative Good Systems. I earned my PhD in Communication from the University of Washington, where I was a researcher at the Tactile and Tactical Design Lab in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering. In 2019, I was a fellow at the Smithsonian Museum’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. I’ve also worked with collaborative research teams at the University of Oxford, MIT, and as a pre-doctoral intern at Airbnb. I earned my Masters in Communication from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

e-mail me: samshorey (at) pitt.edu | bluesky: @samshorey