Dr. Bass works in the Department of Systems and Information Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia. She has almost thirty years of experience in systems engineering with relevant experience in complex, dynamic systems. Her research involves modeling human judgment and decision making in the domains of healthcare, air transportation, meteorology, bioinformatics, and process control in order to inform system requirements, procedures, display designs and training.
Ellen Bass's research impacts the university community and society. With her students and medical collaborators, Bass developed a hand-off of care decision support tool that residents and hospitalists at UVa's Health System use every day. With UVa's Center for Alcohol and Substance Education, she and her students have helped to reduce the negative consequences of celebratory drinking. With collaborators at the Engineering Research Center for the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere, she and her students have helped to develop a novel weather sensing and prediction system that provides information to weather forecasters and emergency managers so that they can make better severe weather assessments and therefore better protect the public.
Bass is a senior member of the IEEE and currently serves as the Associate Editor in Chief for the journal IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans. She is the Program Chair of the Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making (CEDM) Technical Group of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and a member of the editorial board for the journal Human Factors. She is a contributing editor of The International Journal of Applied Aviation Studies.