The iSchool, College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University, is pleased to welcome the following new faculty members:

Dr. Ellen Bass – Professor

Dr. Bass comes to the iSchool from the University of Virginia where she served as Associate Professor in the Department of Systems and Information Engineering. She has over 30 years of human-centered systems engineering research and design experience in air transportation, biomedical informatics, healthcare, process control, and weather related applications. Early in her career, Dr. Bass was a systems engineering practitioner, specifying and testing the human-automation interaction for real-time, complex systems. Since then she has established a strong research program in that area of human factors. The focus of her research is to develop theories of human performance, quantitative modeling methodologies, and associated experimental designs that can be used to evaluate human-automation interaction in the context of total system performance. The outcomes of the research can be used in the systems engineering process: to inform system requirements, procedures, display designs and training interventions and to support system evaluation. Dr. Bass is the Chair Elect of the Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making Technical Group of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. She is a senior member of the IEEE and the Editor in Chief for the journal IEEE Transactions on Human-machine Systems. She is a member of the editorial board for the journals Human Factors and IIE Transaction on Occupational Ergonomics and Human Factors. She is a contributing editor of The International Journal of Applied Aviation Studies, and is Associate Editor for the Sociotechnical System Analysis department of the journal IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering. She is a member of the Board on Human-Systems Integration (BOHSI) in the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (DBASSE) of the National Academy of Sciences. Bass holds a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Lorraine (Lori) Richards – Assistant Professor

Lorraine (Lori) Richards comes to the iSchool from the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, where she is in the final stages of completing her doctoral program. Her  dissertation, entitled “Evidence-as-a-Service: State Government Recordkeeping in the Cloud,” examines the impacts of cloud computing on the roles and responsibilities of recordkeeping stewards in state government environments in which cloud computing has recently been implemented.  Lorraine has taught courses at UNC, Chapel Hill in electronic records management, management of information organizations, and understanding information technology for managing digital collections. She has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics and taught economics for ten years at several San Francisco Bay area universities including California State University East Bay, University of San Francisco, and Golden Gate University.  In her capacity as a manager and consultant at Deloitte, she specialized in data quality and integrity and implementing enterprise business knowledge systems.  She managed the implementation of data warehouses and metadata repositories at several organizations.  In addition, over the course of her professional life, she developed successful business cases for the funding of a $1.1 billion automated medical record system, a $600,000 business process redesign, a $100,000 ID card quality improvement project, and a $500,000 online credit card payment system. Lorraine has published on the economics of libraries and archives and aided the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access in its research, co-authoring its interim report. She also acts as an instructor for the DigCCurr Professional Institute, which offers a comprehensive program designed to foster skills, knowledge and community-building among professionals responsible for the curation of digital materials.

Norm Balchunas, Col (Ret) – Director of Strategic Solutions & Assistant Research Professor for the Applied Informatics Group

Norm Balchunas comes to the iSchool from the Association of Old Crows (a not-for-profit military association) in Alexandria, VA, where he served as Deputy Executive Director–Operations. Norm holds a Master’s of Strategic Studies from the Air War College of Air University (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL), a Master’s of Public Administration from Golden Gate University (San Francisco, CA), and a B.A. in Anthropology from Bloomsburg University. Norm is a Colonel (Ret.) in the United States Air Force, where he performed over 25 years of dedicated service specializing in strategic planning, electronic warfare, information operations, cyber-attack, and has lead combat operations in Operation Enduring and Iraqi Freedom.

For more information about The iSchool, College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University, please visit http://ischool.drexel.edu.