Lene Nielsen

Lene Nielsen is an Associate Professor at ITU, Section for Digitalization, Democracy and Governance, member of the Reflact research group

Her research focuses mainly on personas, and includes democratic businesses and service systems 

Lene Nielsen was the first to write a PhD about personas.

Her research topics include the many aspects of the development and use of personas, such as:

• Global personas
• Personas based on quantitative data
• Persona descriptions as communication to specific and different audiences
• The relationship between persona description and data
• The use of personas in agile development
• Personas in service design
• Planetary Personas
• AI generated personas

Lene Nielsen har published three books, 5 chapters on personas and more than 90 papers

Lene Nielsen teaches Organizing and managing services

Impact

More than 25 research projects with industry. 

Coaching companies to develop and implement personas

2022: Research input to the expert group assembled by a Danish united parliament on advancing cooperative start-ups in Denmark

2025: Development of Planetary Personas as a business case with Olivia Harre

2025: Guest Editor: Special issue on AI-Generated Personas: Representing User Needs with Generative AI Models. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. Nov. 2025