Sean A. Munson

Dr. Sean Munson is a Professor at the University of Washington's Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering. His research has helped define personal health informatics: the study and design of how people collect, make sense of, and act on data about their health. His group's work spans the full arc of this space: understanding individual sensemaking, designing for collaboration with clinicians, peers, and caregivers, and designing for changing goals and lapses in tracking to fit real-world use cases. He also studies digital wellbeing and fairness in sociotechnical systems.

Sean also co-directs the UW ALACRITY Center. The ALACRITY Center uses human-centered design and implementation science to redesign evidence-based psychosocial interventions for mental health to be more usable and contextually appropriate, with a goal of supporting greater uptake and sustained, high quality use. The Center has supported redesign of evidence-based interventions across more than 20 projects spanning depression, trauma, anxiety, autism, suicidality, and youth behavioral health — in settings including primary care, schools, community health centers, and the VA, and with populations including rural, underserved, and culturally diverse communities across the US and internationally. Frameworks from this work, including the Discover, Design/Build, Test (DDBT) framework for intervention redesign, are widely used by research groups and health systems.

Sean's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality, the National Institutes of Health, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and Google. He is a Distinguished Member of the ACM and recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. His work has received eight Best Paper Awards at leading HCI venues including CHI and CSCW. His research has been covered by national and international media including the New York Times, The Atlantic, BBC, and the Washington Post.

In addition to his research and teaching, Sean is HCDE's Associate Chair for Faculty & Research Development, a member of the DUB group, and a co-founder and steering committee member for SIGCHI Interactive Health.

Sean completed a BS in Engineering at Olin College in 2006 and his PhD at the University of Michigan School of Information in 2012. Previously, he was a political blogger and, while at Boeing, designed concepts for future passenger airplane interiors.

Keywords: Personal informatics, computer-supported cooperative work, health, mental health, human-computer interaction, human-centered design, social computing, implementation science, algorithmic fairness