I am pleased to announce the recipient of this year’s AoIR Dissertation Award. The award-winning dissertation, “Programmed sociality: A software studies perspective on social networking sites,” was written by Taina Bucher. Bucher received her PhD from the University of Oslo and is currently a Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo. Her dissertation examines the connections between social networking software and sociality, looking in particular at the ways that software influences norms and forms of social life. I would also like to congratulate Lauren Sessions Goulet and Yukari Seko, who each received Honorable Mentions from the committee. Goulet received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and her dissertation is titled “Friends in all the right places: Social resources and geography in the age of social network sites.” She currently works as a researcher at Facebook. Seko received her PhD from York University with a dissertation titled “Wound uploaders: Visual narratives of self-injury on social media.” She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Toronto. As chair of the Dissertation Award committee, I would also like to extend my thanks to the committee members: David Brake, Caroline Haythornthwaite, and Erika Pearson. We received thirty-five dissertations, a significant increase over last year. We were quite impressed with the high quality and great variety of the dissertations. Please join me in congratulating Drs. Bucher, Goulet and Seko! Lori ____________________________________________________________ Lori Kendall Vice President, Association of Internet Researchers Associate Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign loriken at illinois.edu