Sydney Graham, Ph.D.
Dr. Sydney Graham is a researcher and consultant specializing in human-centered insights for both product development and employee health in tech and education. Drawing on her PhD in Communication, she has experience
recruiting and facilitating research with hard-to-reach populations, conducting needs assessments to align stakeholders and improve workplace culture, and leading a UX research study at Microsoft to inform product development and onboarding strategies. She does immersive, insight-driven work that bridges human experience for tech and education organizations.
Sydney has executed end-to-end research projects, spanning landscape scanning, participant recruitment, survey design, interview guide writing, diary study execution, ethnographic observation, data analysis, and reporting – skills that she brings to many types of client engagements. She has competency in R for data visualization and advanced qualitative analysis tools such as HeyMarvin.
Sydney's published research has investigated the relationship between stigma, identity, and gender in both organizational and occupational contexts as well as the role of generative AI in new employee experiences. Sydney’s most recent publication demonstrates how legal sex workers in Nevada craft personas to manage structural stigma of their work. Sydney's dissertation is a post-intentional phenomenological study examining industry stigma and gendered, religious, and neoliberal discourses in the context of multilevel marketing. The study resulted in a consultant needs framework that suggested changes in the first six weeks of onboarding to decrease consultant turnover and strategies for organization's to manage risk from a negative image.
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Further, Sydney led the end-to-end execution of a mixed-methods UX research study at Microsoft, including, survey and diary study design, discussion guide development, qualitative data collection, data analysis, and reporting. The study resulted in a catalog of use cases utilized by product teams to improve Copilot’s capabilities within Microsoft 365 as well as onboarding practices for new employees that reduced organizational and professional uncertainty. Her internship was a partnership between Microsoft Research and Microsoft Experiences and Devices. Specifically, communication and identity theorizing to understand how new employees use Generative AI to become integrated and productive team members. She also recently worked as a Qualitative Research Analyst on an organizational culture assessment project with the Jamison Agency. In partnership with the agency founder, she analyzed over 500 open-ended surveys as well as considered interview and focus group transcripts to develop an organizational change management plan that guided executive decision-making and intervention through five strategic programming initiatives that aligned multiple stakeholders.
Sydney's work is published in Communication Studies and she has co-authored several book chapters. She has also presented at national and international communication conferences including the National Communication Association (NCA) and Central States Communication Association (CSCA) conferences as well as the international conference, “Prostitution in Nevada and the Basque Country.” In 2024, she was awarded a Top Student Research Paper Award in the Organizational Communication Division at the annual National Communication Association Convention.
At the University of Missouri, Sydney taught Organizational Advocacy, Business and Professional Communication, and Public Speaking courses. She also worked with the Trulaske EDGE program's Advanced Professional Development course in Mizzou's Trulaske School of Business. In 2023, Sydney was awarded the Writing Intensive Teaching Excellence Award by the University of Missouri Campus Writing Program and the Outstanding Graduate Teacher Award as voted on by the Association of Communication Graduate Students.
During her time as a graduate student at the University of Missouri, Sydney served as the President, Vice President, and Secretary of the Association of Communication Graduate Students and co-chair of the Social and Awards and Policy committees.
Regarding additional professional experience, Sydney has facilitated many professional trainings on topics such as inclusive organizational communication and public speaking. In 2023, she served as a Summer Communications Associate for Heart of Missouri United Way. In this position, Sydney interviewed nonprofit agency partners and drafted communications for the organization’s website and newsletter. Prior to beginning the doctoral program at Mizzou, Sydney worked in communications and social media for a private museum in Washington, D.C.
