Douglas J. Gillan

Biography

Douglas J. Gillan is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at North Carolina State University (NC State) in Raleigh, NC.  He received a B.A. in Psychology from Macalester College (St. Paul, MN) in 1974 and a Ph.D. in Biopsychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1978.  He was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University and a Sloan Foundation Cognitive Science Fellow at University of Pennsylvania.  He worked for 10 years in industry at the General Foods Research Center and at Lockheed Engineering and Sciences at NASA-JSC.  He returned to academia as a visiting scholar at Rice University, then as a faculty member at the University of Idaho, New Mexico State University (NMSU), and NC State.  He served as the Head of the Departments of Psychology at NMSU and NC State for five years and ten years, respectively.  Gillan is a Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.  He has served as an Associate Editor of Human Factors and is a member of the editorial board of The Journal of Usability Studies.  His research interests focus broadly on the interaction between humans and technology.  He has investigated issues in human-computer interaction and human-robot interaction.  Much of his research has centered around the cognitive and perceptual processes that underlie comprehension of graphical and numerical displays of information.  In addition, he has published extensively on the relation between science and practice in human factors and on mental models.  The National Science Foundation and the Army Research Laboratory have funded his research.