Bio: Jim Hollan co-directs the Design Lab. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship in artificial intelligence at Stanford, Hollan was on the faculty at the University of California, San Diego for a decade. He led the Intelligent Systems Group in the Institute for Cognitive Science. He left UCSD to become Director of the MCC Human Interface Laboratory and subsequently established the Computer Graphics and Interactive Media Research Group at Bellcore. In 1993, he moved to the University of New Mexico as Chair of the Computer Science Department. Hollan returned to UCSD in 1997. He was elected to the ACM CHI Academy in 2003 and received the ACM Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015.

Research: Jim Hollan explores the cognitive consequences of computational media. His research is motivated by a belief that we are at the beginning of a paradigm shift in thinking about computational media, one that is starting to appreciate the importance of representations that are not only dynamic and interactive but also adapt to the structure of tasks, the context of activities, and even our relationships with others. The research goal is to better understand the cognitive, computational, and social ecology of dynamic interactive adaptive systems. His research spans across cognitive design, distributed and embodied cognition, human-computer interaction, multiscale information visualization, multimodal interaction, cognitive ethnography, and software tools for visualization and interaction. His work involves four intertwined activities: developing theory and methods, designing representations, implementing prototypes, and evaluating their effectiveness to better understand the broader design space in which they are situated. Current research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Chancellor's Interdisciplinary Collaboratories Program, Nissan, and SAP. Previous work was funded by California's Digital Media Innovation Program, Darpa, Intel, Microsoft, Nissan, NIH, NSF, and Sony.