Dr. Bruckman is an Associate Professor at the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, and a member of the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center. She received her Ph.D. from the Epistemology and Learning Group at the MIT Media Lab in 1997, and her B.A. in physics from Harvard University in 1987. She does research on online communities and education, and is the founder of the Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) research group.

Dr. Bruckman's research applies the "constructionist" philosophy of education to the design of online communities. Constructionism advocates learning through design and construction activities -- learning through working on personally meaningful projects. The Internet has a unique potential to make constructionist learning scalable and sustainable in real-world settings, because it makes it easy to provide social support for learning and teaching. In electronic learning communities, participants can help motivate and support one-another's activities.

She founded the College's Undergraduate Research Opportunities in Computing (UROC) program.

Dr. Bruckman's research is funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER Grant, as well as generous grants from IBM, Intel, Microsoft Research, Neometron, and Ricoh Silicon Valley.