Home
Founding Assistant Professor
Department of Information Science
College of Media, Communication, and Information
University of Colorado Boulder
UCB 315
Boulder, CO 80309-0315 USA
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 assistant 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.
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) |
| see more... | |||
Recent Articles, Papers, and Presentations
- Hoefer, M.J.D., Van Kleunen, L., Goodby, C., Blackburn, L.B., Panati, P., & Voida, S. (2021). The multiplicative patient and the clinical workflow: Clinician perspectives on social interfaces for self-tracking and managing bipolar disorder. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ‘21, pp. 907–925), Virtual Event. ACM Press.
- Van Kleunen, L., Muller, B., & Voida, S. (2021, April). ”Wiring a city”: A sociotechnical perspective on deploying urban sensor networks. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5(CSCW1).
- Cho, J., Devendorf, L., & Voida, S. (2021). From the art of reflection to the art of noticing: A shifting view of self-tracking technologies’ role in supporting sustainable food practices. Late-breaking work (poster) presented at the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘21), Yokohama, Japan, May 8–13.
- Mirza, R., Anderson, K.M., & Voida, S. (2021, April). EPIC Collab: Supporting asynchronous collaboration in big data analysis systems. In Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Big Data Analytics (ICCCBDA ‘21), Chengdu, China. IEEE.
- Petelka, J., Van Kleunen, L., Murnane, E., Albright, L., Voida, S., & Snyder, J. (2020). Becoming (in)visible: Privacy, transparency, and disclosure in the self-management of bipolar disorder. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Honolulu, Hawai’i. ACM.
- Norris, W., Voida, A., Palen, L., & Voida, S. (2019, November). ‘Is the time right now?’: Reconciling sociotemporal disorder in distributed team work. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction—CSCW 3(CSCW), Article 98.
- Lim, H., Huang, X., Miller, S., Edelmann, J., Euken, T., & Voida, S. (2019). Smart Cook: Making cooking easier with multimodal learning. Poster presented at the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2019), London, UK, September 11–13.
- Van Kleunen, L., Holton, J., Strawn, D., & Voida, S. (2019). Designing navigation aides for wildland firefighters. Poster presented at the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2019), London, UK, September 11–13.
- Van Kleunen, L., & Voida, S. (2019). Challenges in supporting social practices around personal data for long-term mental health management. Position paper for the Fourth International Workshop on Mental Health and Well-being: Sensing and Intervention, held in conjunction with the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2019), London, UK, September 10.
- Bardram, J.E., Jeuris, S., Tell, P., Houben, S., & Voida, S. (2019, August). Activity-centric computing systems. Communications of the ACM 62(8), 72–81.
- Cho, J., & Voida, S. (2019). Toward critical reflection: Observing practices of noticing to develop interventions in personal informatics. Position paper for the DIS 2019 workshop on Exploring Noticing as Method in Design Research, held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2019), San Diego, California, June 24.
- Snyder, J., Murnane, E., Lustig, C., & Voida, S. (2019, May). Visually encoding the lived experience of bipolar disorder. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 133:1–133:14), Glasgow, Scotland, UK. ACM.
- Norris, W., & Voida, S. (2019). Unwinding pluritemporal time in digital humanitarian crowdwork. Position paper for the CHI 2019 workshop on The Future of Work, held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2019), Glasgow, Scotland, May 5.
- Murnane, E.L., Walker, T.G., Tench, B., Voida, S., & Snyder, J. (2018, November). Personal informatics in interpersonal contexts: Towards the design of technology that supports the social ecologies of long-term mental health management. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction—CSCW 2(CSCW), 127:1–127:27. CSCW 2018 Best Paper Honorable Mention (among the top 5% of all submissions).
- Van Kleunen, L., & Voida, S. (2018). From personal to collective informatics. Position paper for the CSCW 2018 workshop on Social Issues in Personal Informatics, held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2018), Jersey City, New Jersey, November 4.