Bryan Semaan is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Information Science (INFO) at CU Boulder. He is the founder and director of the Al-Adala Lab, which focuses its efforts on creating a just, fair, and equal digitally mediated society. The overarching goal of his research is to examine the role of ICTs in enabling resilience amongst people immersed in challenging contexts (e.g. people’s experiences with racism and stereotyping, LGBTQ+ people “coming out”, and refugees integrating into new sociocultural contexts). He seeks out contexts where he can explore the relationship between technology and resilience and that allow him to better understand how people actively use ICTs in the production of resilience. He especially focuses on those contexts where people might be unable to generate resilience with ICTs, or where the present design of ICTs and other social systems can produce additional threat or vulnerability in people’s lives (e.g. algorithms). Focusing on diverse situations and populations, his research integrates qualitative, quantitative and computational analysis, as well as participatory and speculative design approaches, to understand the uses of ICT, critique the design of existing sociotechnical systems, and design novel technologies.
Prior to joining the INFO Department at CU Boulder, he was an Associate Professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine, specializing in Social Informatics. His work is primarily published in top-tier SIGCHI venues, including ACM CHI and ACM CSCW. He has received many awards for his work, and his research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, amongst others.
