Associate Professor with the Center on Work, Technology & Organization in the Department of Management Sciences and Engineering

Pamela, who is an Associate Professor in Management Science & Engineering at Stanford, works at the intersection of organizational behavior and engineering. Her research and teaching leverage the social sciences to understand the effects of technology on groups and teams, particularly those embedded in organizations. One of her passions is to understand and improve how people work across boundaries, including geographic distance, cultures, disciplines, and expertise. This draws her into the domains of perspective-taking, empathy-building, communication, awareness, and, to some extent, the technologies that support these accomplishments.

Pamela is probably most known for her research on internationally distributed work teams, but has recently been dabbling in research on the effect of mobile, autonomous robots in the workplace. She is co-editor with Sara Kiesler of the book Distributed Work (MIT Press).

For the last 6 years, Pamela has taught a course on Contextual and Organizational Issues in Human-Computer Interaction. The focus of this project-based course has been on the process by which designers develop an understanding of users or potential users of a technology and then design a product accordingly.

Together with Terry Winograd, Pamela is teaching the Spring d.school course Tools for Experience Design.

Although Pam's goal is for work to be so enjoyable and engaging that it doesn't feel like work, she also thrives when she is designing culinary experiences, making glass beads and beaded jewelry, scuba diving in exotic locations, and spending quality time with her husband and their two dogs.