CIS Alum Receives Prestigious NSF Award

Former UO doctoral student, Yolanda Reimer (Ph.D. 2001), won a prestigious NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award for 2006. This five-year, $500,000 award will fund her work as Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Montana. The project, "From Pen and Paper to Computer: An Emerging Notetaking Paradigm for Students" investigates how the process of note taking is changing for students in higher education, and how to better support this emerging paradigm by offering critical software support. "One of the goals of this work is to develop an electronic notebook (e-notebook) application that supports the most crucial functions for student note takers, that works seamlessly in conjunction with other electronic sources, and that is accessible from a wide variety of locations and computer platforms." said Reimer. "I really want to focus on the people aspect of computing. From my perspective, no matter how fast or "glitzy" a computer application is, if it's not designed to be useful and usable for the end-users, it won't be adopted by them the way it should and could." The NSF Career Award is in addition to an earlier awarded NSF SGER grant.

While in the CIS Department, Reimer worked in the area of Human-Computer Interaction under the supervision of Professor Sarah Douglas. Her current research builds on her dissertation, "Information assimilation in the Digital Age: Developing support for Web-based notetaking tasks" in which she studied and innovated new user interfaces to a sophisticated Web database of genetic data about the zebrafish (ZFIN). See University of Montana, Computer Science for more information.