Daren C. Brabham, Ph.D., is an accomplished researcher with experience in both scholarly and applied industry contexts. He is a VP Research Analyst at Enterprise Technology Research (ETR), a market research firm specializing in the enterprise IT market that delivers insights to financial services and tech vendor clients. Prior to ETR, he was a senior industry analyst at Gartner specializing in enterprise architecture to support data, analytics, and AI initiatives.
Before transitioning to industry, Brabham was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Southern California. There, he taught courses in public relations, ethics and social responsibility, and new media technology. He was the first to publish scholarly research on crowdsourcing, an online problem-solving method that leverages online communities for certain goals. His scholarly research program focused on understanding how to apply crowdsourcing to challenges in government, transportation, urban planning, public health, and business. He is the author of the books 'Crowdsourcing' (MIT Press, 2013) and 'Crowdsourcing in the Public Sector' (Georgetown University Press, 2015), as well as several peer-reviewed articles in high-impact journals. From 2016 to 2019, Brabham was a member of the Standing Committee on Health Threats and Workforce Resilience at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine.
At UT-Austin, Brabham teaches on user experience and design thinking.