The Department of Information Science is thrilled to announce the hiring of three new faculty members – Kyle Harms, Wendy Ju and René Kizilcec. Bolstering our distinguished field of Information Science professors and scholars, our newest faculty members arrive to Cornell as specialists in human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, interactive technologies, and more. 

Kyle Harms is a welcome addition to the Department of Information Science this fall as a lecturer. He has enjoyed teaching Human-Computer Interaction Methods and Data Structures and Algorithms at Washington University in St. Louis, where he received his PhD. Harms previously worked as a software engineer for The Boeing Company. He has developed an open-source novice programming environment for middle-school children called Looking Glass.

Wendy Ju will join the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech as an Assistant Professor. She was most recently Executive Director for Interaction Design at the Center for Design Research at Stanford University. Her work in the areas of human-robot interaction and automated vehicle interfaces highlights the ways that interactive devices can communicate and engage people without intruding or interrupting. Ju completed her PhD in mechanical engineering from Stanford. Her monograph on The Design of Implicit Interactions was published in 2015.

René Kizilcec will join the Cornell IS Department in Fall 2018. He is currently the Director of Digital Learning Research and co-founder of the Lytics Lab at Stanford University, where he received his PhD. His research is on social and cultural psychological factors in interactive technologies and his work has been published in leading journals such as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Computers & Education. His research has been awarded an ACM Best Paper Award and a Computational Social Science Fellowship.

Along with these three, Solon Barocas and Jeff Rzeszotarski – who were hired last year – also join our Ithaca campus this fall.