The Academic History Basics:

Leysia Palen is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder and a faculty fellow with the Institute for the Alliance of Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) and the Institute of Cognitive Science (ICS). She is the Director of the Connectivity Lab and principal investigator on the NSF Funded Project EPIC: Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis. Her training and interests are socio-technical, with a focus on ethnographic studies of coordination and practice that inform technology design, implementation, and policy. Her most recent work is in the area of crisis informatics, though she has worked, and in some cases continues to work in areas of aviation, digital privacy behaviors, personal information management, mobile technology diffusion, technology and family, health care, and cultural heritage.

Prior to her appointment at Colorado, she completed her PhD at the University of California, Irvine in Information and Computer Science and her undergraduate education in Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego.  Professor Palen was awarded a 2006 National Science Federation Early CAREER Grant to study information dissemination in disaster events. In 2009, Palen and her colleagues were awarded $2.8M from the National Science Foundation for Project EPIC: Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis. In 2005-2006, Professor Palen was a visiting professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark in the Center for Interactive Spaces and the Center for Pervasive Healthcare.

More Research Background:

Most recently, Professor Palen and her colleagues have investigated computer-mediated communications in multiple mass emergency and mass convergence events including August/September 2005 Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Virginia Tech Shootings of April 2007, the Southern California Wildfires of 2007, the US Democratic and US Republican National Conventions of August and September 2008, Hurricanes Gustav and Ike in September 2008, the US/Canadian Red River Floods of 2009 and 2010, the Oklahoma Grass Fires of 2009, the H1N1 epidemic, the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, the 2010 Chile Earthquake and the 2010 Gulf Coast Oil Spill.