Jacobs Executive Committee
Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Bjoern Hartmann is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is broadly interested in tools to support human ingenuity, across a number of domains including design, programming and engineering. I am also interested in embodied cognition, especially in AR/VR. Methodologically, his group predominantly focuses on systems research: they contribute complex, working interactive systems that embody their research ideas and enable them to test specific hypotheses. However, he also appreciates (and they conduct) careful, controlled experiments. He holds the Paul and Judy Gray Alumni Presidential Chair in Engineering Excellence, was previously a Qualcomm Faculty Fellow and have received an NSF CAREER award, Sloan fellowship, and Okawa research award. His group predominantly publishes at the top HCI conferences UIST, CHI and CSCW. They also publish in more topic-specific venues like DIS, ICSE, VL/HCC, and Learning@Scale. Their work has received multiple best paper prizes at these conferences.
Bjoern is affiliated faculty in the Berkeley Institute of Design. Previously, from 2016-2023, he was the Faculty Director of the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation. Prior to leading the Jacobs Institute, he co-founded the CITRIS Invention Lab, a lab equipped with many digital fabrication and rapid prototyping tools. The lab served as inspiration and testbed for many our research projects. He was also involved in the Swarm Lab. He spent time with great colleagues at the Berkeley Center for New Media, and the Visual Computing Lab. He received his PhD from the Stanford Computer Science department in 2009 where he worked with Scott Klemmer (dissertation). He received an MSE in Computer and Information Science as well as Undergraduate Degrees in Digital Media Design and Communication from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002.