Robb Lindgren is the Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Educational Psychology and Curriculum & Instruction in the College of Education. His research focuses on how people learn with interactive and immersive digital technologies. He has affiliate appointments at the Beckman Institute, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the Informatics program in the iSchool, the Center for Social & Behavioral Science (CSBS), and the Computers and Education program in the Grainger College of Engineering. Dr. Lindgren teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses pertaining to the design of digital learning environments, theories of learning and interactivity, and methods for conducting research on how people learn through their interactions with emerging technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality. Dr. Lindgren is the Interim Director of the Center for Research and Innovation in Technology-Enhanced Learning, or ITEL. The ITEL Center is the research hub on the Illinois campus for the design of emerging technologies to address critical issues in education. 

Dr. Lindgren’s research examines theories and designs for learning within emerging media platforms (e.g., simulations, virtual environments, mobile devices, video games, augmented and mixed reality, AI, etc.). He seeks to understand how digital technologies can be used to construct new identities and generate new perspectives that lead to stronger comprehension of complex ideas, particularly in STEM content areas. His work investigates how physical, body-based interactions with learning content can facilitate new understandings, and how games and simulations can be effectively designed to take these types of interactions as input. He is also interested in how digital technologies can provide new approaches to assessing learning, such as examining where learners focus their attention, what choices they make, and how well they adapt to new situations. Dr. Lindgren has been PI of several NSF-funded research projects examining how people learn in technology-enhanced environments. He and his lab have created prototypes for several STEM learning games and simulations, and they are currently working with local schools and museums to co-design and iterate on several new technology platforms.