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Crystallizing curiosity

By Shannon Mullane (MJour’19)

Leysia Palen was walking back after teaching an undergraduate class in fall 2022 when her phone rang. Only, her phone never rings. Thinking it might be something urgent, she answered and heard Todd Saliman, the president of the University of Colorado’s four-campus system, on the line.

“I said, ‘Oh hi!’ like it was normal,” she said. “Then he congratulated me, and he told me the news.”

That was when Palen, a professor with a joint appointment in the departments of information science and computer science, learned she had just been awarded CU’s highest honor: the title of distinguished professor.

Since the award was established 45 years ago, only 138 professors have been recognized in this way across all four campuses. Palen—a “rock star” advisor who forged a new area of study and founded an academic department—was clearly a fitting candidate, according to past students and colleagues. For Palen, however, the news felt surprising and surreal.

“I had to tell people about it before it really sunk in,” Palen said. “In the aftermath, as I digested it, it made me feel great because it newly synthesized the different aspects of being a professor into one whole.”

The job of a tenured professor is divided into research, teaching and service, and Palen has shown leadership in all three, according to about 100 pages of nomination letters, instructor ratings and department recommendations submitted during the consideration process.

Distinguished Professor Leysia Palen is known in the academic community for her efforts to support her students and colleagues.

Often considered an authority figure in the field of crisis informatics, Palen has been named a distinguished professor for her work inside and outside the classroom.
Palen, who has a joint appointment with the departments of information and computer science, was recognized as a distinguished professor, the highest honor CU faculty can receive.

Breaking ground in research

Palen joined the University of Colorado Boulder as a half-time research professor in 1998 after earning a doctorate in information and computer science from the University of California Irvine and working for Microsoft and the Boeing Company.

In 2004, she began to focus her research on coordination using technology in one of the harshest environments, disasters. At the time, the World Wide Web was just over a decade old, online blogs had rolled out, Facebook was just being launched, and smartphones were imminent.

People were beginning to adopt these tools in new ways during times of crisis, Palen said. And as a first-generation college student, she wanted to do research that both contributed new knowledge and had practical applications for daily life.

“So the disaster arena was a place both to help and give back in a serious way, as well as critically think about large-scale coordination, or lack thereof, as it's technologically mediated,” Palen said.

Now, Palen is considered the creator and the leading authority in the field of crisis informatics, which focuses on the role of information produced by both official and unofficial actors when dealing with disaster situations in real time.

Her research has been cited more than 20,000 times and has won numerous awards. Highly relevant to the general public, Palen’s work has attracted media attention from outlets such as The Atlantic, CNN, The New York Times and PBS. She has also been recognized with election to the ACM CHI Academy and the prestigious ACM CHI Societal Impact Award for her work in crisis informatics.

“Professor Palen is a brilliant researcher with incredible vision,” said Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington, in her nomination letter. “Her contributions to the scientific community and to the University of Colorado are both broad and profound. Her research has bridged theory and practice to contribute solutions to real-world problems and to define a new, interdisciplinary scientific field—crisis informatics.”

ÌęÌę is a multidisciplinary field combining computing and social science knowledge of disasters; its central tenet is that people use personal information and communication technology to respond to disasterÌęin creative ways to cope with uncertainty.

From Science, volume 353, issueÌę6296

The science of mentorship

Starbird, now one of the world’s foremost experts on social media and disinformation, first met Palen over a coffee during a visit to CU before her first year as a doctoral student.

“I remember thinking to myself that she was the smartest person I’d ever met and that I was going to do whatever I could to find a way to work with her,” Starbird said in her nomination letter. “Leysia was a ‘rock star’ advisor—who invested in her students’ personal and professional success.

Palen’s record as a doctoral advisor is “remarkable,” according to the award nominations. In fields that remain male-dominated, the majority of her past graduate students and five of her six current doctoral students are women. Several of her women advisees, including Starbird, have gone on to achieve significant success.

“I don’t think I’d be a researcher if I hadn’t met her—if I hadn’t had the chance to be advised by her,” Starbird said.

As an instructor, advisor and mentor, Palen focuses on supporting her students as they learn to hone their own research ideas. She tries to figure out what people bring and where they want to go—which only adds to the diversity of perspectives in the field, Palen said.

She thinks of it in terms of helping students learn how to crystallize their own curiosity into clear thinking. With practice, it becomes systematic—then you can apply it to everything you can possibly encounter, she said.

“When you work on difficult problems, if you’ve got crystal clear clarity about how you’re thinking about something, you can really go far,” Palen said.

During the spring 2023 semester, Palen is working on new research and ongoing grant projects. The distinguished professor award has liberated her to more fully integrate research, teaching and service, she said. It’s exciting to bring research thinking into the classroom and new questions raised by classroom students back into the lab.

“There's this real, deep satisfaction about feeling like an integrated scholar,” Palen said. “Ultimately, you don't need a title or a rank to feel integrated along the lines of research, teaching and service, but I couldn't believe how much it helped to have my institution realize that about me.”