Open SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador 2019: Farmingdale – Brian O’Keefe

Brian O’Keefe, Ph.D., is currently an Assistant Professor of Interaction Design leading SUNY’s first undergraduate Interaction Design Program at Farmingdale State College. He is a user experience and mixed reality specialist who has won over $500,000 in grant funding from the New York State Economic Development Council. Dr. O’Keefe is currently focused on teaching students to be designers/innovators of new human-centered experiences rather than simply being consumers of technologies, applications, services and devices.

He has been a featured speaker at international Human Computer Interaction conferences for publication, commercialized devices and mobile services, patented numerous inventions, won grant awards, exhibited several emerging technologies and won several commercial and academic awards for the advancement of user experience design.

Formally, Dr. O’Keefe was a Senior User Experience Design Lead at Fujifilm, commercializing user interfaces for Walmart photo lab kiosks in North and Central America. As a Lead User Experience Architect at EffectiveUI, he won major sales bids with Verizon Wireless and delivered various design deliverables throughout the project’s lifecycle. As a Visiting Assistant Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, he won grant funding from New York State’s, Council on the Arts to design mobile augmented reality experiences at heritage locations. As a tech start-up entrepreneur, he was the founder and user experience director at TourBlend Innovations LLC., brining new geo-located mobile tourism services to New York State visitor industries. Dr. O’Keefe was a Senior Interaction Designer at Eastman Kodak patenting and designing photo memory products and interfaces. During his post doctorate at Edinburgh Napier University, United Kingdom, he designed and evaluated photo-centered conversational interfaces with artificial intelligence and natural language processing. As a Ph.D. student, he was a contracted lecturer teaching (in Italian) graduate and undergraduate graphic and interactive design courses to European students at the University of Siena, Italy.

In 2007, Dr. O’Keefe earned his Ph.D. in Telematics and the Information Society (Human Computer Interaction) from the University of Florence, Italy, and in 2002 he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in graphic and interaction design from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia, USA.