Rene Kizilcec
Assistant Professor
Information Science
Biography
René Kizilcec is an Assistant Professor of Information Science in the School of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University, where he directs the Future of Learning Lab. His research focuses on the impact of digital technologies in educational contexts, particularly questions of equality in online learning and social-psychological barriers to success, and scalable interventions to improve educational outcomes and reduce achievement gaps. Kizilcec is known for his research on understanding and supporting learners in open-scale courses such as Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. He also works on developing methods for the design and analysis of experiments. His research has been published in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Educational Psychology, Computers in Human Behavior, Computers & Education, and in the proceedings of leading human-computer interaction and education conferences; his work received multiple ACM Best Paper awards and competitive research fellowships.
Kizilcec received a BA in Philosophy and Economics from University College London, and an MSc in Statistics and PhD in Communication from Stanford, with a thesis on designing psychologically welcoming online learning environments, which was awarded the Nathan Maccoby Outstanding Dissertation Award. Prior to joining Cornell, he worked as a research scientist in Facebook’s Core Data Science team, research director in the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and as research faculty at Arizona State University.
Research Interests
Education
- Ph.D., Communication, Stanford University, 2017
- M.S., Statistics, Stanford University, 2015
- B.A. (1st class honors), Philosophy and Economics, University College London, 2011