Ben Hellar is a student in Minds lab at Penn State, majoring in Information Science and Technology. Currently, he is the only 3rd or 4th year student in the lab. Last year 3 different students graduated, including Varun Adhibhatla, Bimal Balakrishnan, and Mark Pfaff. Varun was a Masters recipient, and now works for Bank of America. Mark Pfaff acheived a Ph.D and now works at the Indiana University School of Informatics as an Assistant Professor. Bimal now works at University of Missouri-Columbia as an Assistant professor in the dept. of Architectural studies, after recieving a Ph.D in the field of Mass Communications.
Ben Hellar was an undergraduate IST student (graduating class of 2004) who initially entered the IST graduate program as a Masters student, but then became a Ph.D candidate. He is currently researching ways of using Neocities as a test platform to study cognitive load and user interface designs that may increase or decrease the effects thereof. Ben successfully passed his proposal defense, and is currently heavily engaged in product development in order to test a new version of Neocities.
Ben has co-authored a number of papers related to Homeland Security and Data Fusion. On graduation, he is most likely interested in pursuing a career outside of academia.