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Associate Professor and Founding Faculty
Department of Information Science
College of Media, Communication, and Information
University of Colorado Boulder
UCB 315
Boulder, CO 80309-0315 USA
Office Hours: By appointment
Contact me via email:
svoida@acm.org (research)
svoida@colorado.edu (CU)
stephen@voida.com (personal)
The United States is currently experiencing a two-fold mental health crisis. First, our cultural disposition to overwork, including expectations of 24/7 availability and the virtues of being "busy" at all times are creating significant, work-related mental health pressures, embodied by unhealthy levels of stress and increased instances of burnout. Second, psychiatrists and psychologists are experiencing a vast increase in the number of individuals seeking mental health services for anxiety, depression, and mood disorders.
In response, I conduct research in mental health informatics from a human–computer interaction (HCI) perspective, drawing on interdisciplinary research methods and theories from ubiquitous computing, computer-supported cooperative work, health informatics, and psychology/cognitive science. My research examines both the existing negative and potential positive influences of information technologies on people's mental health. My students and I have found that technology is part of the mental health problem, and also demonstrated how well-designed technologies can be a part of the solution.
As an associate professor and founding faculty member in the Department of Information Science at CU Boulder, I teach various programming, hands-on research seminars, and ubiquitous computing courses, and I at least try to keep up with a few hobbies to stay balanced.
I'm always interested in working with motivated students! If you are currently enrolled at CU, please email me for more information about signing up for independent study course credits. If not, please take a look at the information for prospective students on the CU-Boulder admissions web pages, as well as the specific PhD applications requirements for information and computer science. I do anticipate recruiting new (external-to-CU) students more slowly over the course of the new several years as I re-build my research group, post-sabbatical, with a very targeted emphasis on technology design for mental health and context-aware diabetes care.
Current and Featured Research Projects
 Technology to Support Individuals with Bipolar (2012–Present) |  Temporality in Information Work (2013–Present) |  Multitasking, Email, and Stress |  Giornata (Activity-Based Computing) |
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Recent Articles, Papers, and Presentations
- Messer, L.H., Cook, P.F., Voida, S., Fiesler, C., Fivekiller, E., Agrawal, C., Xu, T., Forlenza, G.P., & Sankaranarayanan, S. (2023, May). Situational awareness and proactive engagement predict higher time in range in adolescents and young adults using hybrid closed-loop. Pediatric Diabetes 2023.
- Yamamoto, F.R., Cho, J., Voida, A., & Voida, S. (2023, April). “We are researchers, but we are also humans”: Creating a design space for managing graduate student stress. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.
- Hoefer, M.J.D., Schumacher, B.E., Szafir, D.A., & Voida, S. (2022). Visualizing uncertainty in multi-source mental health data. In Extended Abstracts of the 2022 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’22), New Orleans, LA. ACM Press.
- Norris, W., Voida, A., & Voida, S. (2022, April). People talk in stories. Responders talk in data: A framework for temporal sensemaking in time- and safety-critical work. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6(CSCW1).
- Ozkaynak, M., Voida, S., & Dunn, E. (2022, February). Opportunities and challenges of integrating food practice into clinical decision making. Applied Clinical Informatics 13(1), 252–262.
- Cho, J., Xu, T., Zimmermann-Niefield, A., & Voida, S. (2022). Reflection in theory and reflection in practice: An exploration of the gaps in reflection support among personal informatics apps. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22), New Orleans, LA. ACM Press. CHI 2022 Best Paper Honorable Mention (among the top 5% of all submissions).
- Hoefer, M.J.D., Schumacher, B.E., & Voida, S. (2022). Personal dream informatics: A self-information systems model of dream engagement. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22), New Orleans, LA. ACM Press.
- Cho, J., Beck, S., & Voida, S. (2022, January). Topophilia, placemaking, and boundary work: Exploring the psycho-social impact of the COVID-19 work-from-home experience. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6(GROUP). GROUP 2022/2023 Best Paper Award (among the top 1% of all submissions).