Melissa Mazmanian

About

Melissa Mazmanian is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. She holds the position of Chancellor's Fellow and serves as the Informatics Department Chair. Her research interests revolve around communication practices in personal and organizational contexts, with a focus on social norms and the nature of personal and professional time in the digital age. She conducts ethnographies of personal time, examining the role of communication theologies in how families juggle busy lives and negotiate work and personal demands. Additionally, Melissa is interested in the intersection between formal power structures and everyday practices within organizations, engaging in qualitative research on practices such as budgeting, electronic health systems, change efforts to promote predictable time off, and smartphone use in work contexts.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Social psychology
• Social Science
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Engineering
• Mathematical analysis
• Art
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Beyond self-reflection: introducing the concept of rumination in personal informatics

  Personal and Ubiquitous Computing · 2021 · 72 citations

  Abstract Personal informatics tools can help users self-reflect on their experiences. When reflective thought occurs, it sometimes leads to negative thought and emotion cycles. To help explain these cycles, we draw from Psychology to introduce the concept of rumination—anxious, perseverative cognition focused on negative aspects of the self—as a result of engaging with personal data. Rumination is an important concept for the Human Computer Interaction community because it can negatively affect…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dreams of the Overworked

  2020 · 47 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  This book is a riveting look at the real reasons Americans feel inadequate in the face of their dreams, and a call to celebrate how we support one another in service of family and work in our daily life.

  DOI

• Investigating Data Work Across Domains

  CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts · 2022-04-27 · 24 citations

  articleSenior author

  In the wake of the hype around big data, artificial intelligence, and “data-drivenness,” much attention has been paid to developing novel tools to capitalize upon the deluge of data being recorded and gathered automatically through IT systems. While much of this literature tends to overlook the data itself—sometimes even characterizing it as “data exhaust” that is readily available to be fed into algorithms, which will unlock the insights held within it—a growing body of literature has recently…

  PublisherDOI

• Are You One of Us?

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2020 · 19 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  To better understand how we can broaden participation in computing, this exploratory study examines the interview process for elite internships at established technology companies. Through conducting 36 interviews with evaluators at technology companies, we find that in addition to technical competence, evaluators often assess internship applicants based on explicit and implicit signals of industrial fit, organizational fit, and individual fit. These evaluative criteria are reminiscent of prior…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Crisis of Care: A Curated Discussion

  Journal of Management Inquiry · 2025-02-25 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  Caregiving and career have been primarily studied by management scholars for their incompatibility. Largely ignored have been the consequences of this approach for the lives of workers. Yet the need for both childcare and eldercare is on the rise, women are increasingly integrated into the workforce, and, for many, retirement is being delayed. Particularly in the United States, workers and their families are experiencing a crisis of care. In this curated piece, we identify—and aim to dismantle—f…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Examining the 'Class Ceiling' in Big Tech

  NSF · $673k · 2019–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Christine M. Beckman

  22 shared

• Gillian R. Hayes

  University of California, Irvine

  18 shared

• Lynn Dombrowski

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  13 shared

• Christina Herzog

  9 shared

• Debra J. Richardson

  9 shared

• Juliet Norton

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  9 shared

• Daniel Pargman

  9 shared

• Ankita Raturi

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Best Information Systems Publications Award

Similar researchers at University of California, Irvine

• Martha Feldmanh-52
• Gerardo Okhuysenh-31
• Christopher Baumanh-20