His doctoral work was titled "Schema-Based Problem Solving" which was based on "using recombinations of pre-stored plans in sophisticated ways".

While at University of Rochester, Russell did research work in "the neuropsychology of laterality, models of apraxia and aphasia, coordinated motor movements and computer vision".

He then worked in the User Interface Research group, led by Stuart Card, which studied the uses of information visualization techniques.

He managed research within the User Experience Research Group which studied issues of sensemaking, cognitive modelling of analysis tasks, synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, shared awareness of individual state, joint work coordination, and knowledge-based use of complex, heterogenous information.

As Director, Russell also worked alongside the Apple CEO Tim Cook and founder Steve Jobs in corporation on Network Computing.

From 1998 to 1999, Russell led the Madcap project, a system to capture, organize and render large amounts of complex presentation materials into an understandable whole.

He subsequently became a senior manager where he led larger research groups in areas covering user experience design of large systems.

He coordinated the development of two Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) on effective searching skills which were launched in 2012 on PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com, which had more than 3 million students.

[19] Russell's research focus has been human experience with search engines and in large, complex collections of information.

[21] Russell's authored publications in topics including education innovation, human–computer interaction and visualization, information retrieval and the web, and mobile systems can be found on the Google AI website.

On it, Russell describes a day in his life, how he works and some personal topics [26] On August 9, 2017, his blog arrived to the first 1,000 posts.

In 2013, Russell received the UC Irvine Bren School's 2013 Lauds & Laurels Distinguished Alumnus award.