Gloria Mark


Gloria Janet Mark is a professor in the Department of Informatics at University of California, Irvine. She has published over 150 papers and is noted for her research on Social computing and the social impacts of Digital media. In 2017, she was inducted into the CHI Academy for her contributions to the field of Human-computer interaction.

Education

She earned her M.S. in biostatistics from the University of Michigan in 1984 and her PhD in psychology from Columbia University in 1991.

Career and Research

Research

Mark is an active researcher on human-computer interaction with her primary research revolving around social computing. In particular, her research interests have led to a variety of investigations of individuals and their workplace environment.
Some of her most notable findings include the effects of multitasking on millennial college students in the digital workplace. Correlations were drawn from stress, time spent at a computer and multitasking as there was a measure of the subjects’ mood and stress using biosensors and logging computer activity. In 2004, Mark published a CHI paper that argued that the design of information technology in the workplace is not optimal for a worker's work organization. It suggests that the worker naturally organizes their work in a manner that is much larger in connected units of work than the intended IT design – known as a working sphere. Her 2005 CHI paper investigates the high frequency of work fragmentation among information workers and its implications on technological design. She also published a paper that thoroughly examines contextual reasoning on an information worker's attention state. Among others, it was found that the workplace has more focused attention than boredom and that workers are the happiest when undergoing rote work.

Career

Mark's work has been covered in popular media outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Atlantic and BBC. She has also presented at the SXSW and Aspen Ideas festivals.

Notable honors and awards

Mark was awarded the Best CHI paper in 2014 and the Google Research Award in 2011 and 2014. She is recognized with a Columbia University Graduate Fellowship and received a Fulbright Scholarship from Humboldt University in 2006. Furthermore, Mark was a recipient of the National Science Foundation Career Grant for her work from 2001 to 2006 and in 2004–05, she was awarded the Outstanding Graduate Student Mentor Award from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. Mark has been recognized for her significant career contributions to research as she received the UCI ICS Dean's Mid-Career Award for Research in 2015 and inducted to the CHI Academy in 2017.