Derek L. Hansen

Derek L. Hansen is an Assistant Professor of Information Technology within Brigham Young University's College of Engineering and Technology. He was formerly at the University of Maryland's iSchool and Director for the Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information (http://casci.umd.edu), a multi-disciplinary research center focused on harnessing the power of novel social technologies to support the needs of real and virtual communities.

Dr. Hansen completed his PhD from the University of Michigan's School of Information where he was an NSF-funded interdisciplinary STIET Fellow (http://stiet.si.umich.edu/) focused on understanding and designing effective online socio-technical systems. His research and teaching focus on mass collaboration, information reuse, consumer health informatics, and social network analysis of online communities. One line of research is focused on helping community analysts make sense of the mass of social data available through social media sites. Another line of research applies those methods to understand best practices for supporting mass collaboration in medical, scientific, and entertainment domains. Finally, Dr. Hansen is involved with designing novel tools that take advantage of the unique properties of information technologies. For example, he has done work on "collection recommender systems" and social networking applications designed to anonymously disseminate information about stigmatized illnesses through friendship networks.