Derek L. Hansen is an associate professor in the Information Technology program at Brigham Young University. Prior to that he was at the University of Maryland’s iSchool where he directed the Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information and was a member of the Human Computer Interaction Lab. Dr. Hansen completed his PhD from the University of Michigan’s School of Information where he was an NSF-funded interdisciplinary STIET Fellow focused on understanding and designing effective online socio-technical systems. Dr. Hansen’s research and teaching focuses on understanding and designing social technologies, tools, and games for the public good. He has received over $2 million in grants (as a PI or co-PI) to help develop and test novel technical interventions with interdisciplinary collaborators including educational Alternate Reality Games (AGOG, DUST, The Tessera), Playable Case Studies (Microcore), Citizen Science games (Floracaching, Odd Leaf Out), and exercise games (Fitplay Games, various pervasive play games). He has also worked with the Social Media Research Foundation and Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) to develop and evaluate NodeXL, a free network analysis and visualization tool that runs in Microsoft Excel and is designed to help community analysts make sense of the mass of data available via social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and email.
