Birsen Donmez is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering and is the 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 also spent two years as a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Aeronautics and Astronautics Department.
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 applications primarily in transportation and healthcare. Donmez’s selected honors include an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement (2016-2019) 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). She serves on multiple committees of the Transportation Research Board of the U.S. National Academies, as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems, and as a steering committee member for the ACM AutomotiveUI Conference, for which she was the General Chair in 2018.