Lakeland University Welcomes Two New Faculty
Lakeland University will welcome two new full-time faculty members to its classrooms this fall:
Deyoe comes to Lakeland from Purdue University where she is a doctoral candidate and expecting to defend her dissertation this summer. She has taught several communication courses as well as regular and honors sections of standardized speech and writing courses at Purdue.
She served as a Course Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) Fellow, which included a week-long seminar on pedagogy, workshops throughout the semester, and implementation of a research project in the classroom.
As a CURE fellow, she facilitated two semester-long research projects (fall 2022 and spring 2023) in the classroom. She worked with students to conduct qualitative content analyses of video footage from the C-SPAN Video Library of industry professionals and government officials discussing science topics.
Deyoe has maintained an active research agenda concentrating on how social media platforms impact communication. Her research primarily explores how social media impacts political communication and how politicians understand and engage with social media, and how social media impacts strategic communication and how strategic communicators leverage social media to connect with audiences.
Her work has received recognition through numerous awards, publication and presentations.
In her dissertation, Deyoe is attempting to extend theorization of parasocial experiences on social media. Considering the perspective of both the social media content creator and content consumer, she employs a bottom-up approach that uses qualitative interviews to explore individual experiences of parasocial relationship development and maintenance.
Deyoe is completing her doctorate from Purdue’s Brian Lamb School of Communication with a focus on media, technology and social influence. She has a master’s in communication from Purdue, a bachelor’s in public communication from Indiana University Kokomo and an associate in social and behavioral sciences from Citrus College, Glendora, Calif.
Shahria comes to Lakeland from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he recently completed a Ph.D. in computer science.
He has served as graduate research assistant in UWM’s Biorobotics Laboratory work with Artificial Intelligence and robotics and he taught computer science courses. He also served as chief business development officer for Advanced Software Technology International Ltd. In Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Shahria specializes in artificial intelligence, deep learning and human-centered robotics, with a strong focus on healthcare applications. His research integrates large language models, computer vision and agentic AI to advance assistive technologies, robotics and intelligent human-robot interaction.
Through collaborations with the Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Lab, Rockwell Automation and federally funded projects, he has developed AI-driven systems that enhance accessibility and usability. He brings to Lakeland teaching experience across programming and artificial intelligence as well as experience in creating an inclusive, student-centered learning environment.
His work has received recognition through numerous awards, publication and presentations.
Shahria also has a master’s in computer science from UWM and a bachelor’s in computer science from North South University in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
