Oscar De Bruijn

Overview

Dr de Bruijn is interested in the development and use of cognitive theories to the design of interactive artefacts for communication, information visualisation and decision making. He is particularly interested in information visualisation in the domains of preventative health care, business intelligence, and everyday socio-cognitive decision making (eg, in social networking). He has long-standing collaborations with Bob Spence of Imperial College London, and Kostas Stathis of Royal Holloway University London. He is also collaborating with Alistair Sutcliffe, Sarah Thew, Rob Proctor and Iain Buchan on a project aimed at developing collaborative visualisation tools for epidemiologists.

Biography

Dr de Bruijn has over 15 years experience as an experimental cognitive psychologist, of which the last 10 years have been dedicated to the study of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Cognitive Systems. He obtained an MSc in Experimental Psychology from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and a PhD from St Andrews University in Scotland researching visual word recognition. His postdoctoral research was carried out at Swansea University and Imperial College London. He moved to the University of Manchester in 2002.

His recent work concerns the use of cognitive theories in the design of interactive information artefacts, in particular, for information visualisation and visual sense making. This work has been funded by EPSRC (in 2000 and 2006) and Mitsubishi Electronic. Earlier work looked at information visualisation artefacts embedded in local communities to support social navigation and community interactions funded by the European Union.

He has been an organiser of workshops on ‘Socio-cognitive Grids’ and has been a member of many conference program committees.

Dr de Bruijn teaches undergraduate courses in Global Team Working and Social Media & Social Networks, a postgraduate course in the Psychology of Behaviour and Decision Making, and an MBA course in Risk Management. All his teaching emphasises evidence-based learning either through critical examination of empirical studies found in the literature or through experience and reflection.