Carroll is the second recipient from the U.S. since the award was established in 2010.
“This recognition from IFIP means a lot to me because it reminds me how important it was to my development and to my success to have had a large and diverse set of international colleagues for basically my whole career,” said Carroll. “I have always had access to a great variety of intellectual perspectives and contexts, and much more.
Carroll, who began his career at IBM in the 1970s, traveled internationally to “learn about the wider world so that IBM could operate in the wider world.”
He said, “I learned a lot: about sociotechnical systems, computer ergonomics, work psychology, and about IFIP. IFIP had the vision of integrating computing across the world, country by country, such that every country mattered.”
Carroll is a founder and leading researcher in the field of human-computer interaction, which combines social and cognitive science with information technology and design. With a background in mathematics, linguistics and psychology, his research interests include community innovation, health informatics and wellbeing, coproduction, and the transformation of everyday life through information technology.
His landmark book, “The Nurnberg Funnel,” presented a minimalist approach to instructional design by having the learner — rather than the instructor — determine the methods of instruction to maximize active engagement based on their needs. In 2015, Popular Science named him the “Man Who Killed The Manual” for his development of the minimalist information and instructional design model.
At Penn State, he serves as director of Penn State’s Center for Human-Computer Interaction and co-director of the College of Information Sciences and Technology's Collaboration and Innovation Laboratory. He holds courtesy appointments as professor from the colleges of Engineering, Education and Liberal Arts. In 2018, he received a Faculty Scholar Medal in Social and Behavioral Sciences from Penn State.
In October 2020, Carroll was named a Fellow of IFIP, which recognizes individuals of the highest professional standing in expertise who have made substantial and enduring contributions to the information and communications technology and sciences.
Carroll has earned three lifetime achievement awards from the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and has been elected a fellow or honorary fellow of eight scholarly societies. He has written 27 books and more than 300 research papers, and has received more than 50 research grants.