Associate Professor Milagros (Millie) Rivera is the chair of the Communications and New Media Program at the National University of Singapore. From 1993 to 1999 she was an assistant professor in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida, U.S.A. She was tenured and promoted to associate professor in 1999. In 2000 she became a tenured associate professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, U.S.A.  Dr. Rivera accepted a visiting fellowship with the Communications and New Media Program at the National University of Singapore in July 2002 and became the program's chair in 2004.

After becoming CNM’s chair, Dr. Rivera obtained a SGD$1.6 million grant to add a stream in communication management (public relations) and another in interactive media (games & visual design and human-computer interaction) to CNM and led the revision of the department’s curriculum, which resulted in the introduction of more than 30 new courses over three years. Since 2004 CNM’s teaching staff grew from 8 to about 30 full time lecturers, four adjunct lecturers, 11 full time teaching assistants and over nine part time lab (mostly writing) tutors. The teaching staff is a diverse and multidisciplinary group from more than 15 countries in areas like computing, human computer interaction, engineering, game and visual design, communications, public relations, social psychology, cognitive psychology, humanities, cultural studies and digital/traditional arts.

Under her leadership CNM has become the third largest department in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore with more than 600 majors and has received more than 14 teaching awards in the past four years. Dr. Rivera has also mobilized undergraduate students to become organized as a student society, promoted the creation of an internship program for undergraduate students and created an Industry Advisory Council that provides internships and actively supports activities for undergraduate students.

In December 2008 Dr. Rivera led an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences to collaborate with a team of researchers from the NUS School of Computing to write a SGD$10 million grant proposal for the creation of a Center for Social Media. The Media Development Authority of Singapore gave in-principle approval to the grant in February 2009. The Centre will involve reasearchers from National University of Singapore's School of Computing and the Faculty of Arts and Socials Sciences, The Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) School of Art, Design and Media, and the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay. The grant will fund research aimed at developing social media applications and technology for, and conducting social science research to understand the social media needs of, residents of rural India.

Teaching areas: Regulation of information and communication technologies (ICTs), new media and society, internet regulation, computer/ICT-related crime and governance of ICTs.

Research areas: Regulatory efficiency, ICT comparative policy, online privacy, e-government and information, and communication technologies and development (ICT&D). Her research interest centers in the Asia Pacific Region.

Her work has been published in Science Technology and Society, Communications of the AMC, New Media and Society, Journalism and Mass Communication Monographs, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism History, The Urban Lawyer, Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal, Federal Communications Law Journal, World Internet Law Report, Communications and the Law, Cuadernos de Información (a Chilean academic journal), Asian Pacific Law and Policy Journal, Media Asia and Asian Journal of Communication. From 1999 to 2003, she was the author of the broadcast regulation chapter in Communication and the Law, a media law book published by Vision Press, U.S.A.