Jennifer Preece, PhD
University of Maryland, Professor and Dean, College of Information Studies
Dr. Preece is Dean of the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Prior to this, Dr. Preece was a professor of information systems at UMBC where she was department chair for five and half years until 2002. During this time the department increased in size from 8 to 20 tenured and tenure-track faculty. The number of graduate students doubled to around 300, undergraduate students almost tripled to around 1650 and research productivity increased dramatically.
Prior to joining UMBC, Dr. Preece was a professor at the British Open University for fifteen years before becoming research professor of human-computer interaction and director of the HCI research center at South Bank University, London for two years. In 1996 she moved to the USA. Dr. Preece teaches and writes texts on human computer interaction (www.id-book.com) and online communities.
Her research focus is online communities and social computing. The over arching question that she researches is: 'what makes an online community successful?' Her work provides insights about how sociability and usability are intricately connected in the evolution of online communities. Sociability is concerned with how people interact in digital social spaces. Usability is concerned with how users interact with technology across a human-computer interface.
