Director
Professor, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Canada Research Chair in Human Factors and Transportation
Email: donmez@mie.utoronto.ca
Phone: 416.978.7399
Office location: RS305A
Research Areas: Human factors; human adaptation to technology; designing feedback for guiding operator behavior; driver distraction mitigation; statistical modelling of crash data; decision support for emergency medical transport; interruptions in intensive care settings; unmanned vehicle supervisory control.
Biosketch
Birsen Donmez is a Professor at the University of Toronto, Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, and the NSERC Canada Research Chair in Human Factors and Transportation. She received her MS (2004) and PhD (2007) in industrial engineering, and her MS in statistics (2007) from the University of Iowa. She held a postdoctoral associate position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the University of Toronto.
Donmez’s research interests are centered on understanding and improving human behavior and performance in multi-task and complex situations, using a wide range of analytical techniques. In particular, her research focuses on operator attention in multitask activities, decision support under uncertainty, and human automation interaction, with primary applications in surface transportation and healthcare. Donmez’s selected honors include her Canada Research Chair Award and renewal (2015-2025), an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement (2016), a senior fellowship from the Massey College, the inaugural Stephanie Binder Young Professional Award from the HFES Surface Transportation Technical Group (2014), and an Early Researcher Award from the Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation of Ontario (2015).
Donmez currently serves as the associate chair of research for her academic department. She is also the chair for the Vehicle User Characteristics Committee of the Transportation Research Board of the US National Academies, an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems, an editorial board member for Accident Analysis and Prevention, an evaluation group member for the NSERC Discovery Grant competition, and a steering committee member of the ACM Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI). She served as the General Chair for the AutomotiveUI’18 Conference.