I am a rhetorician, scholar, educator, and digital literacy expert with over 9+ years of cumulative experience working in higher education as an instructor, writing consultant, and curriculum designer, and ~2 years of experience in freelance AI moderation as a search quality rater and domain expert. I am a PhD-level Domain Expert in Rhetoric/humanities with applied experience in AI Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in addition to teaching university-level writing and critical reasoning. As an English Subject Matter Expert (SME) and content evaluator, I provide services including search quality evaluation, content moderation, domain expertise, and other tasks in localization, transcription, and prompt engineering to improve the relevance and accuracy of AI-generated knowledge for companies such as Outlier AI, WeLo Data, and Alignerr. I hold a PhD in Rhetoric with a focus on Digital Literacy and Literature from the University of Texas at Austin, in addition to a Master’s in Rhetoric/English and bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and English with a minor in gender studies. I have held numerous professional positions in higher education, including writing consultant at the UT Austin University Writing Center (UWC), UWC liaison to the Longhorn Center for Academic Excellence, and graduate student assistant researcher and digital content producer for the Digital Writing and Research Lab (DWRL). My academic research focuses on the relationship between technology and culture/politics, and the ways that we write about and study that relationship. Currently, I am revising my past academic work on search engines and “filter bubbles” to incorporate updated research (more information forthcoming) and designing an open-source university course that integrates my applied industry knowledge with my pedagogical background. I also teach part-time in the Austin area and offer professionalization mentorship through volunteer work, bridging my commitment to pedagogy and community with my formal expertise and years of hands-on experience practicing culturally aware, collaborative learning with diverse groups of people.
All images on my personal website and blog are created by me unless otherwise stated.
Additional Information:
Resume (General – Updated April 2026)
Lior Colclough, PhD 