She is the director of the $2.8 million NSF-funded “Project EPIC: Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis.” She examines human behavior in and design of socio-technical systems. Her most recent work is in the area of crisis informatics, though she has worked in aviation, digital privacy behavior, personal information management, and mobile technology diffusion. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine, in Information and Computer Science and her B.S. in Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. In 2006, Palen was awarded an NSF CAREER Grant for her "Data in Disaster" proposal to study information dissemination in disaster events. From 2005 to 2006, she was a visiting professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.