Leysia Palen

Leysia Palen is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and chair of the Department of Information Science in the College of Media, Communication and Information. She is also a faculty fellow with ATLAS and the Institute of Cognitive Science. Palen is a graduate of one of the earliest information studies-related programs, earning a PhD from the University of California Irvine in Information and Computer Science in 1998. She has been a faculty member at CU ever since, serving in Computer Science in the area of human-centered computing. Palen is best known for her leadership in crisis informatics, for which she recently won the ACM Computer Human Interaction Social Impact award. With over 70 manuscripts on informatics and computing topics, Palen integrates a range of empirical approaches for examining socio-technical phenomena to explain interpersonal, organizational and institutional changes in a digitally supported world. Palen’s research is funded by the NSF. She has worked at Xerox PARC, Boeing, Microsoft, the University of Aarhus, Denmark and the University of Agder, Norway.