University of Virginia
Ellen J. Bass

Home

Ellen Bass is an associate professor in the Department of Systems and Information Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia. She has over 28 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, she 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. As Principal Investigator (PI) at the University of Virginia and at Search Technology, Inc., She has led funded research projects totaling over $6M. As institutional PI, she has led two projects totaling over $1M. She has supported other projects totaling over $2.8M. She has authored over 30 refereed journal papers and over 30 refereed conference papers.

The focus of her research program 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. The long term goal is to develop comprehensive measures, modeling techniques and evaluation methods that capture the contribution of human operators (knowledge, skills, and limitations), the dynamic task environment, the tools used (algorithms, decision support tools, displays), organizational factors (such as team roles) and all of their interactions. While earlier her work involved modeling and supporting individual human judgment and decision-making, she has expanded to examine team processes and performance. Her research contributions can be decomposed into three synergistic areas:

Her research impacts the university community and society. With her students and collaborators, Bass is developing novel methods to discover certain kinds of human-automation interaction problems in interactive systems. With her students and medical collaborators, Bass developed a handoff of care decision support tool that residents and hospitalists at UVa's Health System used every day prior to the Epic electronic medical record installation in 2011. With the Gordie Center for Alcohol and Substance Education, she and her students have helped to reduce the negative consequences of celebratory drinking. With collaborators at the Engineering Research Center for the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere, she and her students have helped to develop a novel weather sensing and prediction system that provides information to weather forecasters and emergency managers so that they can make better severe weather assessments and therefore better protect the public.

Ellen Bass is the Program Director and Principal Investigator of UVa's NLM T15 training program "A Systems Engineering Focus on Clinical Informatics," and Program Director of the UVa MINDSET program in the application of systems engineering to medical informatics. Bass is the Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making Technical Group Chair Elect of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. She is a senior member of the IEEE and currently serves as the Associate Editor in Chief for the journal IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans. 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. Bass is an Associate Editor for the Sociotechnical System Analysis department of the journal IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering. Along with Edward Strickler, Bass is a co-convener of UVaPride. She is the faculty advisor of the UVa student chapter of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.