Jens-Erik Mai

Jens-Erik Mai is Professor of Information and an experienced university leader.  In his research, Jens-Erik explores how digital technologies are transforming our relationship with information and with one another.

Grounded in information science, Jens-Erik’s research examines how technologies, data, and digital media shape the organization of and access to information, and what this means for privacy, identity, knowledge, and human agency. His work spans information, communication and media studies, philosophy of information, and digital studies, and includes research on information and cultural institutions, digital information infrastructures, and artificial intelligence.

He is currently working on a book on privacy and identity and is a member of the research group for the Forgetting Secrecy? Reconfiguring forgetting and secrecy in an age of AI project.

Jens-Erik is an active participant in the international information science community as conference chair, workshop organiser, reviewer, speaker, and editorial board member for the Journal of Documentation, Aslib Journal of Information Management, and Journal of Education for Library and Information Science.  

Jens-Erik served as Head of the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen until 2025.  Prior to joining the University of Copenhagen, he was associate professor at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, where he also served as Vice Dean and Acting Dean. Before that, he was assistant professor at the Information School of the University of Washington, where he also co-directed the Center for Human-Information Interaction.  He earned his Ph.D. in Information Science from the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin as a Fulbright Scholar, and his Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from the Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark.

Jens-Erik lives in a small town north of Copenhagen with his wife, Mette Ribergaard Mai.

_{Image credit: Indiana University Bloomington, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering}