Gary M. Olson
Acting Dean of the School of Information 1998-99
Gary M. Olson received his BA from the University of Minnesota in 1967, and his MA and PhD in psychology from Stanford University in 1968 and 1970, respectively. Following service in the U.S. Naval Reserve from 1970 to 1973, he served two years on the faculty of Michigan State University.
Olson joined the University of Michigan as an assistant professor of psychology in 1975 and was promoted to associate professor in 1977 and professor in 1984. He joined UMSI as professor and as associate dean for research in 1995.
Olson was the founding director of the Collaboratory for Research in Electronic Work and oversaw its migration from an Office of the Vice President incubator unit into a UMSI research center. In his role as associate dean, he was instrumental in reshaping the school after its change in scope and mission in 1996, leading to the revitalization of the doctoral program, expansion of the base of externally funded research and the development of the human-computer interaction specialization.
From 1998 to 1999, in the middle of his 11-year term as UMSI associate dean for research, he served as acting dean of UMSI. He was named the Paul M. Fitts Collegiate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in 2001.
Olson has published more than 120 articles and book chapters and is the leading authority on how information technology can be used to support work when participants are in different locations. With his wife Judith S. Olson, he co-authored the book “Working Together Apart: Collaboration over the Internet” (Morgan & Claypool, 2014).
In 2006, he was awarded — jointly with Judith S. Olson — the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award from the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction of the Association for Computing Machinery. The award acknowledged his leadership and lifetime impact on the field of human-computer interaction and contributions to the development of the science of collaboration.
Additional recognitions include being named an Association for Psychological Science Fellow (2009) for his work in the cognitive field and an American Psychological Association Fellow (2010). He received the SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2016.
In 2008, he retired from U-M with the title of professor emeritus of information and psychology. That same year, he moved to the University of California, Irvine, as the Donald Bren Professor of Information and Computer Science. In 2016, he retired from that position but remained active in research. He holds emeritus status at both U-M and UC Irvine.