Faculty of Science and Information Technology

Professor Patricia Gillard

Patricia Gillard is Professor of Communication with a prime focus on research and teaching in audience studies and user research. Patricia has conducted audience research for over twenty-five years in broadcasting, museum, government and commercial contexts. She was a member of the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal Children's Program Committee, 1988-1991 and Head of Research and Development for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1986-1988.

Early research was published as Girls and Television and The Lively Audience in 1986. As Research Fellow and then Head of Communication Studies at RMIT University Melbourne, Patricia directed the Telecommunications Needs Research Group (with support from Telstra) and created a program of research that measured the uses of telecommunications and emerging online services in domestic contexts and from user perspectives.

Patricia developed new methods of user research and evaluation for e-government services. These included evaluations of the award-winning www.pictureaustralia.org and Access Queensland websites, evaluation of the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Ausstats service, an extensive ICT strategy for the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) and identification of user requirements of people with disabilities for the Centre of National Research on Disability and RehabilitationMedicine (CONROD).

A career highlight was working in the Web Program of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian, Washington DC as a Fulbright Fellow in 2001. There she conducted an evaluation of www.historywired.si.edu.

Since 2003, Patricia has extended her research interests to include Knowledge Management, Communities of Practice and Web Based Communities. During 2005 two major projects were completed: an ethnography of A Chorus of Women as a Community of Practice and User Research into Text Terminal Equipment (URITE) involving people with hearing and speech disabilities, funded by Optus.

Patricia founded the Centre for Audience and User Research at the University of Newcastle as a research community applying innovative methods to the study of live and new media audiences.