Galen Panger

Ph.D. Student

Life before the I School

I grew up outside Chicago and went to Stanford University for undergrad, where I got my bachelor’s in public policy. After graduation, I shipped off to Google’s Washington, D.C., office, which was small at the time, and worked on the PR and public affairs team for three years. It was a blast.

Why information

As a kid, I loved programming and design, and my friends and I would dream up branding and logos for new web companies we wanted to start. I was in love with Apple. In high school, I started to recognize that people were able to express themselves in different ways online — ways that I felt were more honest and less self-censored. Even though I think our online services today force us to wear a sort of permasmile, the idea that the Internet could be good for public discourse, and good for self-expression, has never left me. Technology gives us permission to do things and express ourselves in certain ways.

Area of interest

I’m very interested in well-being and public opinion, and in emotion as the basic measurable unit of the human experience. I think we can do a better job of using the Internet to tap into how people are doing, how they’re feeling, and what matters to them — online democracy, in a way, but minus the hype. And we can do a better job of studying the impact Internet services have on our well-being through the design choices they make.
The UN recently adopted a resolution — Resolution 65/309 — which encourages member nations to adopt measures of happiness and well-being as indicators of social progress, apart from income and GDP. I think that’s where the future lies.

Favorite things about the I School

Probably the best thing that’s happened for me here has been my relationship with my advisor, Steve Weber, and getting to sit in his class on behavioral economics. I’ve learned a lot from the way he thinks and the way he frames a topic for discussion, and I really appreciate his non-anxious, curious approach to everything.

What I’m doing now

I had always thought of doing research at Facebook as sort of a far-off goal, but it happened really easily. I’ve just started there working on the user experience research team, asking questions about user happiness and well-being, and about Facebook’s impact on personal relationships.