Vijoy Abraham is a senior member of the ATS Program having started June 1999 with the Dept. of Psychology.  Coming from a background in cognitive psychology and information science, and having worked in research-focused applications of technology at an R1 university, he quickly adapted many of the research support services at the Dept. to engage the web and online interaction.

 Vijoy was an early supporter of online web survey systems, a tool invaluable to the social sciences.  Starting with the Remark Web Survey system in Psychology which was used to launch hundreds of surveys, to the use of the open source LimeSurvey, Opinio (the first instance at Stanford), and Qualtrics prior to its site licensing by the University.  To date, the IRiSS Opinio instance has launched 710 surveys handling over 65k responses and the IRiSS Qualtrics “brand” continues to launch surveys with 53 users having launched 588 surveys in the last 3 years, garnering 112k responses.

 In support of changing trends in Social Science research and scholarship, and to address the continuing interdisciplinary nature of its work, Vijoy is instrumental in launching projects with the Computational Social Science Center and acts as Program Manager for the IRiSS Secure Data Center.  For the latter, he is the problem solver and coordinator for projects employing research data that need to be held in secure confines, be it physical or virtual space, and overseeing the policy and regulatory aspects of the work.

 He also is a general strategist for the Centers housed under the IRiSS umbrella, devoting much time to technical specification, determining human resource needs around research initiatives, and assisting in the execution of outreach and training programs.