Associate Professor, INFO@UMD
Associate Director, HCIL@UMD
Assistant Director, PhD Program in Information Studies@UMD
2118E HBK South | joelchan@umd.edu | CV

👋   Hi, I'm Joel.

I do research and teach to enable a future where informed innovation is accessible to everyone. In this future, researchers swiftly synthesize theories and evidence across disciplines into powerful new research directions; and communities integrate tacit knowledge from lived experience with scientific evidence to design solutions to their most important problems.

I try to map out pathways to this future that are open (vs. gate-kept to privileged elites) and sustainable (vs. powered by exploitative, zero-sum dynamics).

A major current project is building a new infrastructure for research communication that is optimized for collective synthesis, based on discourse graphs, a system for modular, attributable research contributions (see this recent talk, and project website).

Before joining UMD, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Project Scientist in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University, where I worked with Steven Dow and Niki Kittur. I received my PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, where I was advised by Christian Schunn.