Jessie Chin

• Associate Member, Cancer Center at Illinois
• Part-Time Faculty, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
• Faculty Affiliate, Health Care Engineering Systems Center (HCESC)
• Faculty Affiliate, Department of Educational Psychology
• Faculty Affiliate, Illinois Informatics
• Faculty Affiliate, Center for Social and Behavioral Science
• Faculty Affiliate, Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation (CAII), National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

Applied cognitive sciences (information foraging, search as learning, self-regulated learning); coupling cognitive systems (cognitive agents, human-AI interaction and teaming); digital health (designing for health promotion); and health informatics (health literacy, infodemiology and infoveillance).

• NSF CAREER Award, 2025 - 2030
• Inaugural iSchool Research and Scholarship Awards, May 2026
• Facilitating Learning Excellence Award, Fall 2025
• List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by their Students, University of Illinois, 2020, 2024, 2025
• Arnold O. Beckman Research Award, 2022

Jessie Chin is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Chin’s research programs aim at (1) advancing knowledge in cognitive sciences regarding evolving human interaction with the contemporary information technologies, (2) understanding and developing the coupling cognitive systems to augment human performance in complex cognitive activities (such as information search, learning, and creativity work) as individuals and small groups, and (3) translating theories in social and behavioral sciences and computational models to the design of sociotechnical solutions and interaction experience to promote health communication and behavior across the lifespan.

Chin’s work has been recognized by the NSF CAREER Award. As a translational cognitive scientist, Chin conducts use-inspired basic and applied research to examine the interaction between human minds and complex information environments. Chin’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research, National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  See a list of current research projects of Chin's team, the Adaptive Cognition and Interaction Design (ACTION) lab.

Chin earned her MS in human factors and PhD in educational psychology (cognitive sciences in teaching and learning) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and did her postdoctoral training in systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo. 

• Summer 2026 - Independent Study - IS189JC
• Summer 2026 - Independent Study - IS389JC
• Summer 2026 - Independent Study - IS589JC

By appointment, please contact professor

For a complete list of publications, visit Jessie Chin's Google Scholar page.

Selected Publications

Quan, K., Albassam, D.*, Wu, M.*, Ding, Z. & Chin, J. (2026). Towards AI as Colleagues: Multi-Agent System Improves Structured Ideation Processes. In Proceedings of the 44th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI’26., Article 817, 1-26.  Association for Computing Machinery.  https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790375

Quan, K., Ramakrishnan, P., & Chin, J. (2025, June). Can AI Take a Joke – Or Make One? A Study on Humor Generation and Recognition in LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C’25), 431-437. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3698061.3734388. 

Chin, J.*, Desai, S*., Lin, S., & Mejía S. (2024). Like My Aunt Dorothy: Effects of Conversational Styles on Perceptions, Acceptance and Metaphorical Descriptions of Voice Assistants during Later Adulthood. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8(CSCW1), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3637365.

Bak, M. & Chin, J. (2024). The potential and limitations of large language models in identification of the states of motivations for facilitating health behavior change. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 31(9), 2047-2053. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocae057

Desai, S., Lundy, M., Chin, J. (2023). “A painless way to learn:” Designing an interactive storytelling voice user interface to support older adults’ informal health information learning needs. Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces CUI’23, (Article 5, pp. 1-16). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3597141

Desai, S., Chin, J. (2023). OK Google, Let’s Learn: Using Voice User Interfaces for Informal Self-Regulated Learning of Health Topics among Younger and Older Adults. In Proceedings of the 41st ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI’23 (Article 847, pp.1-21). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581507

Tomaszewski, T., Morales, A., Lourentzou, I., Caskey, R., Liu, B., Schwartz, A., & Chin, J. (2021). Identifying the false human papillomavirus vaccine information and corresponding risk perceptions from Twitter using advanced predictive models. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(9), e30451. https://doi.org/10.2196/30451

Chin, J., Moller, D. D., Johnson, J., Duwe, E., Graumlich, J. F., Murray, M. D. & Morrow, D.G. (2018). A multi-faceted approach to promote comprehension of online health information among older adults. The Gerontologist, 58(4), 686-695. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnw254

Chin, J., Payne, B., Fu, W-T., Morrow, D. G. & Stine-Morrow, E. A. L. (2015). Information foraging across the life span: Search and switch in unknown patches. Topics in Cognitive Science, 7(3), 428-450. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12147

Selected Talks

Chin, J. (2022). Invited panelist at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) workshop on Machine Learning and Healthcare Outcomes in Cancer Care Delivery Research on May 16-17, Held by National Cancer Institute’s Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS)