Professor Claire O’Malley
Professor of Learning Science
University of Nottingham
Claire O’Malley is Professor of Learning Science at the School of Psychology, and Dean of the Graduate School, University of Nottigham. She is also a founder member of the Mixed Reality Laboratory and of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at Nottingham, which brings together researchers from psychology, education and computer science to research on learning and technology.
Claire has a BA in Psychology/Philosophy and a PhD in Education (University of Leeds). Her research interests are in computer supported collaborative learning. This includes basic research on the development of collaboration in children. It also involves designing and evaluating CSCL environments that are underpinned by the psychology of learning. Claire has also carried out research on human communication (verbal and nonverbal) and applied studies of the impact of different media (eg video links) on communication processes and collaborative task performance.
Claire has worked in the fields of human-computer interaction and educational technology for around 25 years. She worked in Don Norman’s HCI group at the University of California, San Diego in the early 80s and held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Sussex (COGS) and then the Open University (IET) before moving to Nottingham in 1989. She ran the first international workshop on CSCL in Italy in 1989 and is currently Associate Editor of the International Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. She is also a founder member and a past President of the International Society of the Learning Sciences. Claire has held a number of research grants funded by ESRC, EPSRC and EU. She was Deputy Director of the ESRC Centre for Research in Development, Instruction and Training at Nottingham (1992-2002). She was also an investigator in the EPSRC-funded Equator IRC at Nottingham (2000-2006). She was on the organising panel for the recent ESRC TLRP seminar series on Education and Neuroscience, she is currently co-investigator on one of the nodes funded by the ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science (DReSS) and on one of the large projects funded under the ESRC TLRP Technology Enhanced Learning programme (Personal Inquiry). She is also currently a vice-chair of the ESRC Research Grants Board.
