2026 ACM SIGCHI Awards and Special Recognitions

Kentaro Toyama

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Feb 24, 2026

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We are excited to announce this year’s ACM SIGCHI awardees, Academy inductees, and Special Recognition recipients!

Administered by the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee, award selection is based on a rigorous process beginning with nominations submitted primarily by SIGCHI members. This year, we received 107 nominations in the categories of Lifetime Research, Lifetime Service, Academy, Societal Impact, Outstanding Dissertation, and Special Recognition; 29 nominees were selected for recognition.

The distinctions highlight remarkable achievements in scholarship, service, mentorship, and impact. We look forward to celebrating the awardees, listed below, at CHI 2026 in Barcelona, Spain. Congratulations!

ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award

• Lorrie Faith Cranor — Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Joseph A. Konstan — University of Minnesota, USA

ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award

• Cliff Lampe — University of Michigan, USA
• Helena Mentis — Drexel University, USA

ACM SIGCHI Academy

• Jeffrey P. Bigham — Carnegie Mellon University / Apple, USA
• Laura Dabbish — Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Niklas Elmqvist — Aarhus University, Denmark
• Darren Gergle — Northwestern University, USA
• Kaj Grønbæk — Aarhus University, Denmark
• Chris Harrison — Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Kori Inkpen — Microsoft Research, USA
• Katherine Isbister — University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
• Per Ola Kristensson — University of Cambridge, UK
• Joseph J. LaViola Jr. — University of Central Florida, USA
• Eric Paulos — University of California, Berkeley, USA

ACM SIGCHI Societal Impact Award

• Jon E. Froehlich — University of Washington, USA
• Jacki O’Neill — Microsoft Research Africa, Kenya
• Volker Wulf — University of Siegen, Germany

ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award

Affiliations below indicate doctoral degree institutions. They may differ from current affiliations.

• Humphrey Curtis — King’s College London, UK
• Martin Feick — Saarland University, Germany
• Eunkyung Jo — University of California, Irvine, USA
• Sukran Karaosmanoglu — Universität Hamburg, Germany
• Ben Zhang — University of Michigan, USA

SIGCHI Special Recognition

Special Recognitions allow recognition of achievements that do not fall readily into existing award categories. A brief explanation of the nature of each recognition is indicated.

• AVELA (A Vision for Engineering Literacy & Access) — USA — for building an impactful mentorship ecosystem that empowers thousands of underrepresented youth and strengthens community-rooted STEM learning and workforce development. Co-founders: Kyle Johnson — University of Washington, USA; Vicente Arroyos — University of Washington, USA; Liban Hussein — Boeing, USA
• Sonya S. Kwak — Korea Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea — for industry-academia collaborations that resulted in award-winning robotic systems, patented interaction technologies, and real-world deployments
• Shaimaa Lazem — City of Scientific Research and Technological Applications, Egypt — for leadership in the international HCI community, playing key roles in strengthening HCI communities in both the Arab world and Africa
• Maristella Matera — Politecnico di Milano, Italy — for impactful mentorship in HCI, and HCI community leadership in Italy and more broadly in the Mediterranean
• Brennan Schaffner — Georgetown University, USA — for research on dark patterns and key contributions to a major dark-patterns court case
• Phoebe Toups Dugas — Monash University, Australia — for research on gender diversity and efforts to make SIGCHI and ACM safer for transgender people

Additional Comments

A few words on the selection process: Nominations were sought from the SIGCHI membership in October, 2025, with a deadline in mid-December. (We will likely move the timing earlier in future years.) Volunteer committees, themselves chosen by the SIGCHI EC, then scrutinized the nominations over two months to make final selections. Committee members are not allowed to make nominations for the awards they oversee; and they recuse themselves from discussions/decisions of candidates with whom they have a conflict of interest. Additional vetting occurs at the EC and ACM levels to ensure that awards are consistent with ACM and SIGCHI values.

A heartfelt “thank you!” to two groups: First, we thank all of the nominators, who took the time to organize and submit nominations. Even if your nominee was not selected this year, we deeply appreciate your contribution. Second, I would like to extend my personal thanks to our awards committee members, who volunteered their time — including over the year-end/new-year’s break — to consider each nomination carefully: Lifetime Awards — Gillian Hayes (chair), Eva Hornecker, Robert Kraut; Academy — Meredith Ringel Morris (chair), Hrvoje Benko, Susanne Bødker, Steve Hodges, Amy Ko, Uichin Lee, Daniel M. Russell, Andy Wilson; Societal Impact — Liz Gerber (chair), Nicki Dell, Jan Gulliksen; Dissertation — Ian Oakley (chair), Gregory Abowd, Ellen Do, Mar Gonzalez-Franco, Mary Gray, Vassilis Kostakos, Sean Munson, Paul Strohmeier, Radu-Daniel Vatavu.

A big “thank you” to all who contributed to the process, and congratulations once again to the 2026 awardees!

Kentaro Toyama

ACM SIGCHI Adjunct Chair for Awards

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Biographies

(in alphabetical order by last name)

Vicente Arroyos is a co-founder and active board member of AVELA — A Vision for Engineering Literacy & Access, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding STEM opportunities for underrepresented students of color. Motivated by the outreach programs that sparked his own interest in STEM fields, Vicente has been involved in outreach efforts since 2016 and helped launch AVELA in 2018. Its growth is the result of a massive collaborative effort. Together with a dedicated community of mentors, colleagues, and student leaders, Vicente and the AVELA team have built an impactful mentorship ecosystem that empowers thousands of youth. Alongside his outreach work, Vicente is a Ph.D. Student in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His doctoral research interests include low-power electronics, small-scale robotics, computing for sustainability, sensing and AI applications.

Jeffrey P. Bigham builds systems that advance how people can responsibly work with machine learning to do interesting and useful things. This has taken on a variety of focuses throughout his career — he has worked on applications in accessibility for disabilities, used crowdsourcing to power a wide variety of real-time systems, and most recently developed processes and technologies to create responsible and useful experiences with generative AI. Much of Jeff’s work focuses on accessibility because he sees the field as a window into the future, given that people with disabilities are often the earliest adopters of AI.

Jeff is currently the Director of Human-Centered Machine Learning and Responsible AI at Apple, and an Associate Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction and Language Technologies Institutes in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently working on InformUp.org to enable everyone to learn about and participate in their own local governments. Jeff received his B.S.E degree in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2003, and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 2009.

Lorrie Faith Cranor is Director and Bosch Distinguished Professor in Security and Privacy Technologies of CyLab and FORE Systems University Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. She directs the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) and co-directs the Privacy Engineering program. In 2016 Lorrie served as Chief Technologist at the US Federal Trade Commission. She co-founded Wombat Security, a security awareness training company acquired by Proofpoint. Lorrie founded the Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) and co-founded the Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR). Lorrie serves on the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) Board of Directors, the Aspen Institute Cybersecurity Group, the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) advisory board, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) advisory board. In 2003 Lorrie was honored as one of the top 100 innovators 35 or younger by Technology Review. She was elected to the ACM CHI Academy and named a fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS. She received the ACM CHI Social Impact Award, the International Association of Privacy Professionals Privacy Leadership Award, and (with colleagues) the IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice. Lorrie was previously a researcher at AT&T-Labs Research. She holds a doctorate in Engineering and Policy from Washington University in St. Louis. She has authored or edited several books, including a privacy book for kids. She plays soccer, walks to work, sews her own clothing with pockets, and tries not to embarrass her three young adult children.

Humphrey Curtis recently completed his doctorate in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London. His research examines wearable and discreet augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technologies for people living with post-stroke aphasia. Working at the intersection of human-computer interaction, assistive technology and accessibility research, he investigates how emerging wearable devices and machine learning can better support everyday communication while preserving autonomy, dignity, and confidence. His work is grounded in long-term collaboration with people with aphasia, speech and language therapists and community organisations including Aphasia Re-Connect, employing participatory and research-through-design approaches to ensure technologies are shaped by lived experiences.

Humphrey’s dissertation advances an embodied framing of AAC adoption and design. It reconceptualises communication not as a discrete device-mediated exchange, but as a multimodal and situated process involving speech, gesture, gaze, timing, and material props. Building on this perspective, he develops and evaluates a portfolio of wearable AAC prototypes — from smartwatches to smartglasses — alongside accessible co-design methods tailored for communities with aphasia. The dissertation contributes theoretical foundations for embodied AAC, practical wearable systems and inclusive design methodologies that foreground communication agency and identity. Together, this work broadens the design space of AAC and contributes pathways toward enabling people with aphasia to reclaim and express their personal sense of voice after stroke.

Laura Dabbish is a Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and Director of the Connected Experience Lab, where she investigates the social and organizational dimensions of human-AI interaction, digital labor, and collaborative systems. Her research, published in leading SIGCHI venues including CHI and CSCW, has shaped foundational areas such as social transparency and human computation and has informed the design of widely used industry systems. She has received research support and awards from the National Science Foundation, Google, IBM, Meta, and the Sloan Foundation and was an Aspen Institute Technology Policy Fellow. She also founded one of the first HCI-focused Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs in the U.S., expanding access to computing research for students from diverse backgrounds. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in Computer Science and Psychology from the University of Southern California.

Niklas Elmqvist is a Villum Investigator, ACM and IEEE Fellow, and full professor of Computer Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. He received his Ph.D. from Chalmers University in 2006. Before joining Aarhus, he was faculty at University of Maryland (2014–2023), where he directed the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (2016–2021), and at Purdue University (2008–2014). His research spans data visualization, human-computer interaction, and human-centered AI. He has received Villum Investigator and NSF CAREER grants, along with best paper awards from IEEE VIS, ACM CHI, and ACM DIS.

Niklas has extensive service contributions: papers chair for IEEE InfoVis (2016, 2017, 2020), IEEE PacificVis (2024), and overall papers chair for IEEE VIS (2024, 2025); subcommittee chair for ACM CHI (2020, 2021); associate editor for Information Visualization and the Journal for Visualization and Interaction; and series editor for Springer Nature’s Synthesis Lectures on Visualization. He was elected to the IEEE VIS Steering Committee in 2023 and joined the IEEE VGTC Visualization Academy in 2024. His research has been funded by NSF, NIH, DHS, Google, NVIDIA, and Microsoft. Awards include the IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award (2025), Purdue’s Graduate Mentoring Award (2014), the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Teacher Award (2012), and Purdue ECE’s Chicago Alumni New Faculty Award (2010). He was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2024 and ACM Fellow in 2025.

Martin Feick is a research team leader for adaptive immersion and embodied AI at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He earned his doctorate degree at Saarland University (UdS) and worked as a researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). His research took him, among other places, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University College London (UCL), and the University of Calgary (UoC). Martin’s research focuses on human–computer interaction, where he designs and develops novel human–machine interfaces that integrate seamlessly into everyday life. A central emphasis of his work is the combination of immersive technologies with embodied AI to create adaptive systems that adjust to individual user needs.

Martin’s dissertation advances VR haptics by combining novel hand-based illusions with proxy technology and adaptive personalization. His work integrates rigorous psychophysics, presents hardware–software prototypes, and provides open-source tools. The dissertation yields impactful practical contributions to enhance haptics, deepen theoretical understanding of multisensory integration, and broaden VR accessibility.

Jon E. Froehlich is a Professor in the UW Allen School of Computer Science, a Sloan Fellow, NSF CAREER Awardee, and co-founder of Project Sidewalk, a Crowd+AI platform for mapping and assessing pedestrian pathways deployed in 44 cities throughout the world. At UW, he directs the Makeability Lab — a research group focused on building and studying interactive technology for accessibility, environmental sustainability, and STE(A)M education — and teaches CS courses that explore the materiality of computing and the ever-changing relationships between humans, bits, and atoms. Jon was the General Chair of ASSETS’22, the premier academic conference in the design and evaluation of technology for people with disabilities. In 2021, he was selected for the UW College of Engineering Outstanding Faculty Award and, in 2022, the PacTrans Outstanding Researcher Award. The Makeability Lab’s research has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, the World Bank, UN Habitat, Forbes, and his students have achieved top industry and faculty positions at Michigan, Purdue, UT-Dallas, Delaware, SMU, Accenture Labs, Google, and Johns Hopkins’ APL.

Darren Gergle is the Bao Family Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Northwestern University, where he co-founded and co-directs the Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design (HCI+D).

Darren’s research integrates social and behavioral theory with technology design to understand and improve how people collaborate, communicate, and build shared understanding through technology. His work advances foundational understanding of how visual information, social context, and technological affordances shape collaborative interaction — examining how people coordinate activity within complex sociotechnical systems, including AI-mediated technologies and collaboration among ability-diverse groups. In collaboration with students and colleagues, he has designed more inclusive sociotechnical systems and advanced frameworks for examining positionality and reflexivity in machine learning work practices. This work highlights how values and social context shape model development and use, contributing to broader conversations about responsibility and fairness in human-centered AI.

A sustained commitment to mentoring and field-building has been central to Darren’s career. He served for a decade as Director of Graduate Studies for Northwestern’s Technology and Social Behavior joint Ph.D. program where he supported the development of new scholars working at the intersection of computation, communication, and design. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and industry partnerships. He is a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, and he received his Ph.D. from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Kaj Grønbæk received his PhD in Computer Science in 1991 from Aarhus University, Denmark. He became a full professor in Computer Science at Aarhus University in 1999. In 2018 he became Head of Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University. His research areas span: Participatory Design, Hypermedia, Interactive Spaces, and Augmented Reality. His early work focused on tools and techniques for involving users directly in design of user interfaces and systems. His hypermedia research focused on open hypermedia allowing users to annotate and link in a “transparency” layer on top of arbitrary documents. His interactive spaces research involved interaction techniques for interactive tables, walls and floors. His recent research projects focused on new concepts for empowering industrial workers at all levels with training support and data analysis tools via Virtual and Augmented Reality. These projects were based on application of user-centered design methods.

Kaj has received substantial research funding and been a PI on several large research projects. From 2009–2018 was a part time Lab Manager in a socalled RTO company — the Alexandra Institute — where he conducted applied research and digital product development. He has also been involved in starting two spin-out companies. Finally, in 2007, Kaj co-founded an IT Product Development education program at Aarhus University. The program combines computer science with physical product design, and it currently has an enrollment of 40–50 students annually.

Chris Harrison is a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, directing the Future Interfaces Group (www.figlab.com). He broadly investigates novel sensing and interactive technologies that foster powerful and delightful interactions between humans and computers. These efforts most often lie in emerging use modalities, such as wearable computing, intelligent environments, and mixed reality. Chris has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, many award winning, including two lasting impact awards. He was co-founder and CTO of Qeexo, a startup working at the intersection of AI and HCI, which had its technology installed on more than 400 million devices. Qeexo was acquired by TDK in 2023. Chris has been awarded fellowships by the Packard and Sloan Foundations, Google, Qualcomm, and Microsoft Research. He has also been named as a top 30 scientist by Forbes, a top 35 innovator by MIT Technology Review, and a World Economic Forum Young Scientist. When not in the lab, Chris can be found welding sculptures, paddling whitewater, visiting remote corners of the globe, or restoring his old house.

Liban Hussein is an electrical engineer and integrated circuit designer based in Washington, USA. Liban earned both a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington, where he focused on circuit design, biomedical instrumentation, and secure sensing technologies.

His previous work includes research on secure LiDAR systems and medical imaging devices, and he received a Best Poster Award at the UW Electrical & Computer Engineering Showcase for presenting frequency-encryption techniques in sensing systems.

Outside of engineering, Liban is active in community and cultural initiatives, including Somali Students and Professionals (SSP) and AVELA. He is a co-founder of the nonprofit arm of AVELA, a University of Washington student-led organization dedicated to reducing opportunity gaps in public education by connecting students to college pathways and technical careers. Through AVELA, Liban worked with the organization’s board to develop and teach courses and workshops, particularly during the COVID-19 lockdown period, and helped lead outreach programs and panels focused on underrepresented students. He also mentored participants from these programs, several of whom later matriculated to four-year universities. Liban values education, mentorship, and sharing knowledge, and continues to support community programming and student guidance alongside his professional engineering work.

Kori Inkpen is a Partner Research Manager at Microsoft Research, where she leads the Future Experiences team and advances research on reimagining human + AI experiences. Her work lies at the intersection of human–computer interaction and artificial intelligence, with a sustained focus on transforming emerging technical capabilities into meaningful, human-centered experiences that shape the future of computing.

Over more than 25 years, Kori has made significant and enduring contributions to HCI and CSCW, particularly in advancing understanding of collaboration, coordination, and awareness in interactive systems. Her research has helped clarify how technologies support people working together across co-located, distributed, and hybrid settings, informing the design of collaborative tools and shared workspaces. Kori has also contributed influential research on technology use in everyday social contexts, including studies of families, households, and children that examine how social context shapes interaction. In parallel, her work on video-mediated communication and “being together” at a distance has advanced understanding of presence, connection, and shared experience across time and space.

Prior to joining Microsoft Research, Kori was a Professor of Computer Science at Simon Fraser University and Dalhousie University. She has published extensively in leading HCI venues, reflecting both breadth and sustained impact, and has served in numerous senior leadership roles within the SIGCHI community, including CHI, CSCW, GROUP, and UIST. Widely recognized for her mentorship, service, and long-standing commitment to fostering inclusive and supportive research communities, Kori has had a lasting influence on both the intellectual direction and the culture of the HCI field.

Katherine Isbister is Professor of Computational Media at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she directs the Social Emotional Technology Lab. Katherine received her Ph.D. from Stanford University working with Cliff Nass, where she studied the impact of nonverbal cues in interface agents on end user perceptions and behaviors, applying what she learned to write a book on game character design that translated social psychological and communication theory for game designers. Since then, Katherine’s research has brought theory, method, and practices from games and play to innovation within the design community in HCI. She has been a pioneer in bridge-building between the game design and HCI research communities, playing ongoing leadership roles in both. Some notable contributions include a close examination of the role of emotion in game design in the book How Games Move Us, and the development of playful emotion regulation designs ranging from AR to social robots. The latter work resulted in a Time Magazine Invention of the Year award for a commercial product adaptation of her research team’s prototype. Recently, Katherine has developed playful ‘beyond being there’ social XR prototypes to support workplace meetings and scientific sensemaking, as well as games to help foster climate resilience in communities. She is an ACM Distinguished Member, and a HEVGA (Higher Education in Video Games) Founding Fellow.

Eunkyung Jo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence at POSTECH. As a human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), and Health researcher, she examines how health monitoring technology can better account for the infrastructural complexity of healthcare systems. She has published at top-tier HCI and Health Informatics venues, including CHI, CSCW, and JMIR. Her work has been recognized with a Best Paper Award at CHI (2023) and the Google PhD fellowship in Human-Computer Interaction (2023–2025). Before joining POSTECH, she earned her PhD in Informatics at the University of California, Irvine.

Kyle Johnson is a graduating Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington (UW) and the Co-founder and Executive Director of the outreach nonprofit AVELA — A Vision for Engineering Literacy & Access (AVELA). He works with Professors Vikram Iyer and Sawyer Fuller to explore how combinations of low-power actuation and control mechanisms can be used to create autonomous microrobots optimized for resource constrained applications. These include technologies for battery-free onboard actuation, wireless communication, remote sensing, and control. Kyle is also passionate about helping decrease opportunity gaps in the education system for underrepresented minority youth. He has supported 150+ different AVELA instructors in teaching to over 2,000 K-14 students each academic year since 2023. Findings from this wide-scale outreach are viewable in IEEE’s World Engineering Education Forum (WEEF) and Black Issues in Computing Education (BICE) Conferences. Kyle’s work has been recognized by the Quad Fellowship, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, Amazon Science Hub Fellowship, Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium, and the National GEM Consortium. His publications have appeared in Science Robotics and the ACM MobiCom Conference and have garnered widespread media attention including by the NSF, GeekWire, Popular Science, and IEEE.

Sukran Karaosmanoglu is a postdoctoral researcher in the Human-Computer Interaction group at Universität Hamburg. She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Yasar University in Türkiye and her master’s degree in cognitive systems from Ulm University in Germany. With her interdisciplinary background, she bridges psychology, design, and computer science to investigate how interactive immersive experiences, particularly games, can meaningfully support individuals and contribute to society at large.

In 2025, Sukran completed her Ph.D. in computer science in the Human-Computer Interaction group at Universität Hamburg under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Frank Steinicke. Her dissertation, “Immersive Virtual Reality Games for Societal Impact: Physical Activity, Active Aging, and Social Interaction”, investigated how immersive virtual reality games can address pressing societal challenges by focusing on three key issues: promoting physical activity, supporting active aging, and enhancing social interaction. As a key part of her research, she worked closely with diverse populations, including older adults with dementia. During her doctoral studies, she published over 20 peer-reviewed scientific articles, some of which received honorable mentions at ACM CHI. Sukran plays an active role in ACM CHI, CHI PLAY, and the German HCI community, and participates in international networking programs.

With her dissertation complete, her focus remains on investigating health- and well-being-targeted experiences that are not only engaging and innovative but also socially responsible, inclusive, and human-centered, while extending her research toward addressing environmental challenges.

Joseph A. Konstan is Distinguished McKnight Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota where he also serves as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Science and Engineering. Joe has conducted research on recommender systems — personalization software algorithms and interfaces — for more than 30 years and has been a leading proponent of a human-centered approach to recommender systems. He has published influential papers on recommendation algorithms, diversity and serendipity, explaining recommendations, and field studies of recommendation in practice. His MovieLens system has been used directly for hundreds of experiments and its released datasets have been used by tens of thousands of researchers and students. He also co-taught two popular online course series on recommender systems and on user interface design and evaluation.

Joe is also an active volunteer. He served as President of SIGCHI from 2003–2006, chaired CHI 2012, and served as chair of ACM’s SIG Governing Board (2006–2008) and co-chair of ACM’s Publications Board (2013–2022). He has been recognized with SIGCHI’s 2013 Lifetime Service Award and the 2022 Outstanding Contributions to ACM Award.

Joe is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS and a member of the CHI Academy. His recommender systems work has been awarded the ACM Software System Award (2011) and several of his papers have won lasting impact awards. His current research focuses on making it easier for AI and HCI researchers to conduct online experiments with real users.

Per Ola Kristensson is a Professor of Interactive Systems Engineering in the Department of Engineering, co-founder/co-director of the Centre for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence, and Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. Per Ola is interested in designing intelligent interactive systems that enable people to be more creative, expressive and satisfied in their daily lives. His PhD thesis was on gesture keyboard technology, which he co-invented together with Shumin Zhai in 2001–2002, and in 2007 he co-founded ShapeWriter, Inc., to commercialise this technology. ShapeWriter was selected as the 8th best iPhone application by Time magazine in 2008 and won a Google Android ADC50 developer award in the same year.

Per Ola did his computer science doctoral work at the Institute of Technology at Linköping University, Sweden, and at IBM Almaden Research Center, California, USA. Since then, he has been a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge; Lecturer at the University of St Andrews; Honorary Associate Professor (Docent) in Computer and Systems Science at Stockholm University; and Honorary Reader at the University of St Andrews. In 2013 he was recognised as an Innovator Under 35 (TR35) by MIT Technology Review and appointed a Member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Young Academy of Scotland. In 2014 he won the ACM User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) Lasting Impact Award and the Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane Medal. He is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction and ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems and serves as a Steering Committee Member for ACM CHI, the premier international conference on human-computer interaction.

Sonya S. Kwak is a Senior Research Scientist at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), where she leads interdisciplinary research at the intersection of human–robot interaction (HRI), robotic product design, and human-centered AI. Her work investigates how robotic perception, cognition, and actuation can be embedded into everyday objects and environments, advancing a design-oriented paradigm for robotic products that integrate seamlessly into everyday life. Her research bridges empirical HRI studies, system-level prototyping, and service-oriented design to expand robotics beyond standalone agents toward embedded, human-centered robotic systems.

She has developed multiple award-winning robotic products and systems, including HangulBot, a block-based edutainment robotic product that was commercialized through industry collaboration, as well as collaborative robotic system prototypes such as CollaBot, oOoBOT, and PopupBot, which coordinate multiple robotic products to jointly recognize user context and provide integrated services. These projects have been recognized at leading international venues including ACM/IEEE HRI, IEEE RO-MAN, ICSR, and CES. Her work has also contributed foundational design concepts, including the robotization of everyday things, helping to establish new paradigms for integrating robotic intelligence into familiar artifacts and environments.

Sonya has served in leadership roles within the SIGCHI and HRI communities, including Program Co-Chair of ACM/IEEE HRI and Senior Editor of ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction.

Cliff Lampe is a Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. His research has been in how the design of computing systems mediates communication between people in group interactions. In particular, he has examined the role of computing in fostering social capital via online connects. He also studies intermediation in the form of civic technology, information integrity in social media, and harassment in social media. He has collaborated with both corporate and government partners throughout his career, and was an early mover in the study of social media as a form of mediated interaction.

Joseph J. LaViola Jr. is the Charles N. Millican Professor of Computer Science and directs the Interactive Computing Experiences Research Cluster at the University of Central Florida. Joe is the former director of the Modeling and Simulation graduate program at UCF and was an adjunct research professor and visiting scholar at Brown University. Joe’s primary research interests include pen- and touch-based interactive computing, virtual and augmented reality, 3D spatial interfaces, human-robot interaction, multimodal interaction, and user interface evaluation. Joe has published over 200 refereed journal and conference papers, 8 book chapters, and has 5 patents. Joe has made significant contributions on 3D gestural interfaces and 3D gesture recognition, how stereoscopic 3D viewing, head tracking, gestural control, and eye tracking can affect a player’s performance in video games, and 2D pen-based sketching and gestural input for drawing and math. Joe’s work has appeared in journals such as ACM TIIS and ACM TOCHI, and has presented research at conferences including ACM CHI, IEEE Virtual Reality, and ACM SIGGRAPH. Joe is also the lead author on the second edition of “3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice”, the first comprehensive book on 3D user interfaces. In 2025, Joe was inducted into the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Academy. Joe received a Sc.M. in Computer Science in 2000, a Sc.M. in Applied Mathematics in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2005 from Brown University. Joe is also a senior member of the ACM and IEEE.

Shaimaa Lazem is an Associate Research Professor at SRTA-City in Egypt. After earning her PhD from Virginia Tech, she turned her focus to a critical challenge: how to design technology that moves past its Western-centric roots to serve a truly global majority.

​Shaimaa is a vocal advocate for inclusive tech, using participatory methods and critical frameworks — including decolonial and feminist lenses — to build tools that are genuinely representative. Her research on human-centered NLP in Africa is supported by Google Awards for Inclusion Research and AI in (2020, 2021, and 2025). A 2023 People of ACM honoree and a Leaders-in-Innovation Fellow with the Royal Academy of Engineering since 2018, she is dedicated to ensuring that the next generation of technology is grounded in the diverse realities of its users.
Recognized for her unique role as a bicultural ambassador, Shaimaa serves as a conduit for the Global South — interpreting regional needs for the Global North while mentoring international researchers to foster genuine, reciprocal collaborations. Through her leadership in co-founding ArabHCI and guiding the AfriCHI community, she continues to explore the concept of pluralistic AI, bringing non-Western wisdom and philosophy into the global conversation on our technological future.

Maristella Matera is Full Professor of Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, in Italy, where she leads the Human-Centric Interactive Technologies (HINT) Lab. Her research integrates model-based design, empirical HCI methods, and AI-driven technologies to support the development of intelligent user interfaces that are both technically robust and socially responsible. She has contributed foundational research on web engineering, multimodal interaction paradigms, and AI-mediated interaction, publishing extensively in leading HCI venues. She is involved in numerous national and European research initiatives and actively collaborates with public institutions and industry partners to translate research into societal impact.

A long-standing member of the SIGCHI community, Maristella has played a key role in strengthening and expanding the HCI community in Italy and across the Mediterranean region. She has served in leadership roles within SIGCHI, promoted regional initiatives, and mentored a new generation of researchers in HCI, emphasizing the role of local cultures and individual values in shaping technology research. Her mentorship has supported students and early-career scholars in building international research profiles and contributing meaningfully to the global HCI community.

Helena Mentis is Professor and Head of the Department of Information Science at Drexel University and was previously Professor in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Prior to academia, she held positions at Microsoft Research, Philips Research, Lockheed Martin, Cambridge University, and Harvard Medical School. Helena’s research is to investigate situated communication and collaboration practices in healthcare, and, in turn, develop and deploy new mechanisms for collaboratively sensing, presenting, and interacting with health information. She has published extensively in both HCI and healthcare-focused journals and highly selective conferences and has been awarded grant funding from the NSF, including a CAREER award, and Mozilla Foundation.

Helena’s service for SIGCHI began with founding three different SIGCHI chapters, including PhillyCHI in 2005, which is still active today. She then served as the Chair’s Assistant for CHI 2007, which introduced her to the madness behind the running of CHI. Over the years she has served on a number of CHI and CSCW organizing committees including as CHI 2016 Late Breaking Work co-chair (which she changed the name and scope). In 2015, she was elected to the SIGCHI EC as Executive Vice President and then as President in 2018, where she navigated the SIG through the pandemic. She is currently serving as the Past President on the SIGCHI EC, on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) and ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare, a member of ACM’s Committee on Professional Ethics (COPE), member of SIGCHI CARES which she helped to found, and the Technical Program Chair for the new ACM Interactive Health Conference that she helped to found and be sponsored by SIGCHI.

Jacki O’Neill is founding Lab Director of Microsoft Research Africa, Nairobi. An ethnographer by trade, she is passionate about centering underrepresented voices and designing technologies which enhance agency and create sustainable futures. Jacki brings this passion to Microsoft Research Africa where she leads a multi-disciplinary team, combining research, engineering and design to pursue an ambitious research agenda to build more equitable AI. This involves building culturally and linguistically sensitive AI tools and platforms and requires foundational innovation in NLP and African languages, resource constrained computing, generative models and human-computer interaction.

Over her career — in Xerox Research (Cambridge and Grenoble), and Microsoft Research India and Africa — Jacki has led research projects in AI, crowdsourcing and the gig economy, the future of work, financial inclusion and global health. Her ethnographic approach to understanding work practices to inform technology design puts the focus firmly on the workers to design technology that makes work better. She has both advanced research and had real-world impact, from award-winning technologies to support call centre work, to crowd- and gig work. Her research on financial inclusion in India supported thousands of auto-rickshaw drivers and the social enterprise working with them. More recently the focus has been on building more equitable generative AI for farmers in Kenya and India, and diabetes patients in South Africa. She is an active member of the CHI and CSCW communities and has 16 patents.

Eric Paulos is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at UC Berkeley and Director of the Hybrid Ecologies Lab. He also serves as Director of the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, Director of the CITRIS Invention Lab, and faculty in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM). Across these roles, Eric helps shape Berkeley’s culture of hands-on, interdisciplinary innovation — where engineering, design, and the humanities meet through rapid prototyping, studio practice, and real-world deployments. He also led the launch of UC Berkeley’s Master of Design (MDes) program, advancing a mission to encounter, explore, and excel in designing emerging technologies that benefit people and planet.

Eric is widely recognized as a pioneer in Human–Computer Interaction and technology prototyping, with a distinctive approach that treats design as both craft and critique. In the early 1990s, he developed some of the first internet telepresence robots; in 2002, he created an early smartwatch-style haptic messaging device. He coined the term “Urban Computing” in 2004, helping define a field that examines how technologies transform everyday life across urban landscapes. In 2007, he created early citizen-science air quality sensing systems integrated with mobile phones, anticipating today’s participatory environmental monitoring.

His work is strongly associated with Critical Making — using making as a form of inquiry, where designing and prototyping foreground and critique assumptions, values, and consequences embedded in technology. His research has also introduced influential frameworks including “Counterfunctional Design” and “Unmaking,” which interrogate technology through critique, repair, reversal, and purposeful misuse.

Brennan Schaffner is currently a Postdoctoral Fritz Family Fellow at Georgetown University’s Knight-Georgetown Institute and Communication, Culture, and Technology program. His current research involves mapping the use of empirical evidence in digital platform litigation. His body of work includes investigations into how platforms moderate harmful content and experimental assessments of harmful platform design choices.

Brennan works to apply his research to real-world policy and regulatory contexts by working with litigators and providing comments about platforms’ manipulative practices to regulatory agencies, offering evidence-based recommendations to improve both user and societal well-being. Notably, his research contributing to an expert witness report in a recent court case led to the second largest FTC settlement to date.

He received his Doctoral and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from the University of Chicago advised by Marshini Chetty. He also holds Bachelor’s Degrees in Physics and Computer Science from the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota.

Phoebe Toups Dugas (she/her) is a queer, trans woman whose work addresses people who are marginalised in computing, a perspective she brings to her service to SIGCHI and the ACM. She is an Associate Professor of Human-Centred Computing in the Exertion Games Lab at Monash University and a Science & Technology Australia Superstar of STEM.

Phoebe came to understand the transformational power of games from her own first-hand experience. Her research centres designing for transgender inclusivity, aiming to create new games and software systems that prioritise joy in gender, not simply avoiding harm. Her work highlights the range of genders in the world and their roles in shaping computing; has established design principles for more gender-inclusive computing; and called out harms. In the present climate, her work is as important as ever.

Within ACM and the broader publishing landscape, Phoebe helped press for and develop policy for name changes in scholarly publications. This led to the ACM adopting the first such policy, with other publishers following suit. She brings attention to inclusivity to ACM conferences through her organising roles in CHI 2024, 2025, and 2026, as well as conference leadership and steering roles in CHI PLAY.

Phoebe formerly hails from New Mexico State University, TEEX Disaster City, and Texas A&M University.

Volker Wulf is Professor of Information Systems and New Media at the University of Siegen and a founding member of the International Institute for Socio-Informatics (IISI). After studying at the RWTH Aachen and the University of Paris VI., he got a Ph.D. from the University of Dortmund and a habilitation degree from the University of Hamburg in Computer Science. He was Visiting Professor at Stanford University and research fellow at the University of Michigan as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Volker shaped the research field of Socio-Informatics as an activist-leaning endeavour to tackle societal problems in a bottom-up participatory manner. Socio-Informatics intertwines empirical studies of social practices with the design of ICT artefacts and their infrastructuring in real-world settings. Volker’s work is inspired by local demands in the rural but industrialized region around his university as well as by global challenges such as ICT appropriation under oppressive rule, in (civil) wars, or by refugees and migrants. His academic work contributes to the fields of Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Communities & Technologies, End User Development, and Participatory Design.

He published more than 500 papers and 20 books among which “Expertise Sharing: Beyond Knowledge Management” and “Social Capital and Information Technology” both with MIT Press, “End User Development” with Springer, and “Socio-Informatics — A Practice-based Perspective on the Design and Use of IT Artefacts,” with Oxford University Press are probably the best known.

Ben Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Technology, AI, and Society at Stony Brook University’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He conducts HCI and social computing research on the production and sociotechnical impacts of AI-enabled systems across critical contexts such as work, health, and sustainability. Drawing on training in HCI, STS, and data science, Ben takes a life-cycle-centered approach to examine the promises, inequalities, and often-invisible labor embedded in data infrastructures from development and deployment to governance. His work contributes to theory and informs more equitable, human-centered design and policy interventions. He holds a PhD in Information from the University of Michigan.