About us
- A New Team Member
- Recently, a large manufacturing firm asked if one of their researchers could join us as a co-investigator on a project. Why not? Collaboration makes better field research. So we're leaving a slot open, here, for new colleagues who want to join us in the field.
- Ming Chang Xie, M.A.
- Is about to receive his Master's degree in English. Ming is an experienced fieldworker, who has studied the so-called Chinese middle class, Chinese student computer use, Chinese migrant workers and rural middle-school students. Ming serves as our project liaison from our Beijing, Chaoyang field residence. He has been known to sing karaoke.
- Ken C. Erickson, Ph.D.
- Erickson is the CEO of Pacific Ethnography. He speaks Mandarin well enough to get around in China and Spanish well enough to teach and live in Latin America. Erickson has conducted consumer and design research around the world for Fortune 100 companies, in IT, consumer health, the veterinary and companion animal domains, and restaurants. Erickson is an adjunct professor at Adolfo Ibanez University in Santiago, Chile. A native Californian, Erickson learned how to sail and speak Vietnamese in Kansas, where the presence of water and linguistic diversity are surprising to many (but not to Kansans).
- Martin Hoyem, M.A.
- Martin specializes in US Latino car cultures; he's helping us with our Wendy's work, maintains our project blog through his company, Multimafia, and is kicking off a project on youth and cars in the U.S.A. and elsewhere. Martin is an artist, designer, and ethnographic researcher from the University of Oslo, and residing in a vintage bungalow in an undisclosed, West Coast zipcode.
- Michael Molinyawe, P.T.A.
- Michael is a physical therapy assistant, a specialist in workplace ergonomics, and our team's logistician. Michael is our Operations Director, and shares with Ming a concern about the quality of US karaoke parlors.
- Bruno Moynié, M.A.
- Bruno operates his own filmmaking business, Monde Moderne, Ltd., in Toronto, Canada. He is a senior researcher with our firm and our ethnographic filmmaker. He just completed a world tour for Boeing, filming people and airplanes on four continents. He is a specialist in the cultures of food. It helps that he is from Normandy and knows real butter when he meets it.
- Hai Nguyen, M.F.A.
- Hai holds a M.F.A. in Design Development; he's a trained field researcher and designer. He is heading up our work for Boeing and has played a leading role in understanding design aspects of service delivery for Wendy's International. He seems to think the coffee house is his office, which is just fine as long as his wireless card is working.
- Sergio Poblete O., Lic.
- Sergio is an anthropologist and a specialist in experience design. Based in Santiago, Chile, Sergio has worked on steel products, transportation, and our recent Boeing project, among others. Sergio is handy with both traditional market-research tools and the discovery tools of ethnography. He can help you find real Chilean food in Santiago, far from the globalized coffeehouses of El Golf.
- Michael G. Powell, Ph.D.
- Michael is a Cultural Anthropologist who received his Ph.D. from Rice University. He is an experienced field researcher and an innovative research designer. His research projects have taken him all over Europe and the United States, doing research on consumer insights, organizations, brand management, and public policy and information. Based in Los Angeles, Michael still can't surf but if he squints hard he can (almost) see the ocean from his apartment, and dream.
- Ben Ross
- Ben has an undergraduate degree in anthropology and two years of experience as an English teacher at Chinese universities. Ben is a fieldworker, based in Fujian province in the South of China. He's kicking off a study of companion animals in China and he's helped us with fieldwork in both rural and urban settings. Ben is collecting material for a book in English on Chinese regional cuisine, which means a great deal of his time is spent in small, neighborhood restaurants.
- Ramanathan H., M.L.S., M.Phil.
- Rama is an anthropologist who keeps an office (and a research team) in Pondicherry, in the South of India. He has conducted fieldwork in China and India, and has managed projects in India for an IT firm and for Boeing with Paceth. Rama is happy to have introduced many of our staff to Tamil Nadu and what we call Our India.
- Jo Yung, M.A.
- Anthropologist Jo Yung is based in Hong Kong and Beijing. She just finished a project in Korea on skin-care for a multinational personal care product. She has studied the Chinese middle class, labor relations in Hong Kong, rural-to-urban migrants and rural middle school students in Mainland China. Presently, Jo is working on a Paceth project with Wendy's International related to customer service, wrapping up some research with Boeing, and starting some work on companion animals in China. Ask her about the philosophy of soup: she is, after all, from 香港.