Announcing the 2024 ACM SIGCHI Awards!

Celebrating human-computer interaction research, practice, and impact.

The 2024 ACM SIGCHI Award winners (Image composition: Neha Kumar; credit to individual photographers).

It is with distinct pleasure that I write this post announcing the awardees for the 2024 cycle of the ACM SIGCHI Awards! Centrally administered by the SIGCHI Executive Committee (EC), these awards are given annually in several categories recognizing lifetime achievements in research and practice as well as societal impact and outstanding dissertations. Furthermore, the EC also inducts members into the SIGCHI Academy every year. Being selected for these awards among more than 5,000 registered SIGCHI members is a great honor. The awardees will be formally recognized at the upcoming ACM CHI 2024 conference in Hawaii, USA in May, during which time they will be given the chance to give a talk or participate in a panel discussion.

Without further ado, here follow the awardees, organized by award category and then alphabetical order; their short bios are listed at the end of this post.

ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award

• Susanne Bødker — Aarhus University, Denmark
• Jodi Forlizzi — Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• James A. Landay — Stanford University, USA
• Wendy Mackay — Inria, France

ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award

• Elizabeth Churchill — Google, USA

ACM SIGCHI Societal Impact Award

• Jan Gulliksen — KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
• Amy Ogan — Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Kate Starbird — University of Washington, USA

ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award

• Karan Ahuja — Northwestern University, USA (Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
• Azra Ismail — Emory University, USA (Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
• Courtney N. Reed — Loughborough University London, UK (Ph.D. from Queen Mary University of London, UK)
• Nicholas Vincent — Simon Fraser University, Canada (Ph.D. from Northwestern University, USA)
• Yixin Zou — Max Planck Institute, Germany (Ph.D. from University of Michigan, USA)

ACM SIGCHI Academy Class of 2024

• Anna Cox — University College London, UK
• Shaowen Bardzell — Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
• Munmun De Choudhury — Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
• Hans Gellersen — Lancaster University, UK and Aarhus University, Denmark
• Björn Hartmann — University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Gillian R. Hayes — University of California, Irvine, USA
• Julie A. Kientz — University of Washington, USA
• Vassilis Kostakos — University of Melbourne, Australia
• Shwetak Patel — University of Washington, USA
• Ryen W. White — Microsoft Research, USA

Final Words

Congratulations to our awardees and we look forward to celebrating their great achievements at CHI 2024 in May! I also want to thank our award committee members and chairs for their hard work reviewing and selecting awardees this year. Please continue nominating preeminent people in our field, and consider volunteering to help in our award committee in future years.

Niklas Elmqvist
ACM SIGCHI Adjunct Chair for Awards

Awardee Biographies

Karan Ahuja — Northwestern University, USA

Karan Ahuja is an incoming Wissner Slivka Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Northwestern University. He completed his Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in novel sensing, interaction, and user digitization techniques. Many of his research projects have been open-sourced, deployed in the wild, licensed, and shipped as product features. To date, Karan has published over 30 papers at top computer science venues. He is also a Siebel Fellow, former Editor-in-Chief of ACM XRDS, and is currently a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google.

Shaowen Bardzell — Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Shaowen Bardzell is a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing, where she is also the chair. Originally trained in Comparative Literature, she approaches human-computer interaction in ways that reflect her humanist background, situating her work at the intersection of HCI, Gender Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. A common thread throughout her research program is the exploration of the contributions of feminism, design, and social science to support technology’s role in social change. She was a recipient of the SIGCHI Societal Impact award in 2023.

Susanne Bødker — Aarhus University, Denmark

Susanne Bødker is professor of human-computer interaction in the Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is known for her theoretical and empirical work on second-wave human-computer interaction, computer-mediated activity, and activity theoretical HCI. She has helped develop the research areas of participatory design and computer-supported cooperative work since their start. She has co-managed Aarhus University’s interdisciplinary center for Participatory IT research and has until recently been the PI of an ERC Advanced Grant on Common Interactive Objects. Susanne is a member of the SIGCHI Academy and has previously received the ACM SIGDOC Rigo award in 2008 and IFIP’s TC13 Pioneer Award in 2016. She is an honorary doctor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden since 2018. Susanne has been on the editorial boards of ACM Interactions, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, and Human-Computer Interaction. She was an ACM CHI papers chair in 2012 and 2013.

Elizabeth Churchill — Google, USA

Elizabeth Churchill is a Senior Director of UX at Google. With a background in psychology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science, she draws on social, computer, engineering, and data sciences to create innovative end-user applications and services. She has built research teams at Google, eBay, Yahoo, PARC, and FujiXerox. Her current focus is on the design of effective developer tooling. Dr. Churchill holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and honorary doctorates from the University of Sussex and the University of Stockholm. She is a member of the Association for Computer Machinery’s (ACM) SIGCHI Academy, is an ACM Fellow, and an ACM Distinguished Speaker. She served as the ACM’s Executive Vice President for two years from 2018–2020. Elizabeth has published over 200 articles in peer reviewed journals, in conferences, and in magazines, and has over 50 patents granted or pending. She has also co-edited five books on various topics and has co-authored two books (Foundations for Designing User Centered Systems and Designing with Data). She is a visiting professor at Imperial College’s Dyson School of Design Engineering in London and is an advisory board member for the Pardee RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica, California and also for the Flickr Foundation (flickr.org). She recently took up a position as Co-Editor in Chief of ACM’s Interactions magazine. In 2016, she received a Citris-Banatao Institute Award Athena Award for Women in Technology for her Executive Leadership. She has been named one of the top women leaders in UX over the last several years. In 2023 she received the ACM’s SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award.

Anna Cox — University College London, UK

Anna Cox is a professor of human-computer interaction and Vice Dean (Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion) at University College London. Her research on the use of digital technology across work and personal life-spheres has revealed the influence of design on the productivity and work-life balance challenges experienced across a variety of settings including healthcare, finance, academia, and crowdwork. She has also explored digital leisure activities such as watching videos, playing videogames, and engaging in citizen science projects and their role in supporting work-stress recovery. As a result of her expertise in immersive and addictive technologies, she was appointed as Specialist Advisor to the UK Parliament Department of Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee inquiry in 2019. She has been an active participant in the ACM SIGCHI community. She has played a significant role in the early years of two SIGCHI conference series. She was General Chair of CHI PLAY 2015 and 2016 and member of the CHI PLAY steering committee (2014–2021). More recently she served as Technical Program Chair for CHIWORK 2022 and General Chair of CHIWORK 2023 and is an inaugural member of the CHIWORK steering committee. She has also played an important role in supporting the CHI conference series: she was Technical Program Chair of CHI 2018 and 2019 and has been a member of the CHI steering committee since 2017.

Munmun De Choudhury — Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Munmun De Choudhury is an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing in Georgia Institute of Technology. Trained as a computer scientist, Dr. De Choudhury is passionate about how novel forms of social interaction online might shape, and even benefit or harm our health and well-being. Dr. De Choudhury is best known for laying the foundation of a new line of research that develops human-centered computational techniques to understand and improve mental health outcomes, based on ethical analyses of social media. She has been recognized with the 2023 SIGCHI Societal Impact Award, the 2023 ICWSM and the 2022 Web Science Trust Test-of-Time Awards, the 2021 ACM-W Rising Star Award, the 2019 Complex Systems Society — Junior Scientific Award, as well as nearly two dozen paper awards from the ACM and AAAI. Dr. De Choudhury’s research has also resulted in many practical and policy implications. These range from influencing suicide prevention efforts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to supporting gun control advocacy by the non-profit Everytown for Gun Safety, and to helping the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine outline conclusions about the impact of social media on the wellbeing of young people. Notably, Dr. De Choudhury was an invited contributor to the Office of U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 Advisory on The Healing Effects of Social Connection.

Jodi Forlizzi — Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Jodi Forlizzi is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also a Faculty Lead in Responsible AI in the Block Center for Technology and Society and the Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the School of Computer Science. Jodi has advocated for design research in all forms, mentoring peers, colleagues, and students in its structure and execution, and today it is an important part of the HCI community. Jodi studies the ethical impacts of human interaction with AI systems in front-line service industries including healthcare and hospitality. She also develops methods and tools to ensure that product developers can mitigate ethical harms and bias during product development. She recently testified to the U.S. Senate in an AI Innovation Briefing and collaborates closely with the AFL-CIO Tech Institute.

Hans Gellersen — Lancaster University, UK and Aarhus University, DK

Hans Gellersen is a professor of interactive systems at Lancaster University in the UK and at Aarhus University in Denmark. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1996 from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany. Hans started his career in ubiquitous computing, with early work on computing in everyday objects, systems that blend physical and digital interaction, and techniques that facilitate cross-device interaction. His recent research interests include eye-tracking, gaze for interaction, and multimodal interaction techniques that leverage eye movement in concert with other modalities. Hans was a founder of the Ubicomp conference series in 1999 and serves on the Editorial Board of ACM TOCHI. He has received best paper awards including from the ACM CHI and UIST conferences and the TOCHI journal. In 2021, he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant by the European Research Council for his work on gaze and eye movement in interaction, and in 2022 he received a Humboldt Prize by the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation in recognition of his lifetime’s research achievements.

Jan Gulliksen — KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Jan Gulliksen is professor in human-computer interaction at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He has been the Dean of Computer Science and Communication and Vice President for Digitalization at KTH. He holds an MSc in Engineering Physics, a Ph.D. in Systems Analysis, and a professorship in human-computer interaction, all from Uppsala University in Sweden. He is known for his research on usability and accessibility, on digitalization and digital work environments, and on user-centered systems design. Currently he is involved in projects on expert lifelong learning on advanced digitalization for industry, establishing a policy lab on digital transformation of university education, and on cognitive accessibility for students and teachers, and building a European center for Vocational Excellence on Accessibility. Since 2012 he has been advising the Swedish Government on digitalization policy making, first as chairman of the Swedish Commission for Digitalization and after that on the Swedish Digitalization Council, serving the last seven ministers of Digitalization. He has also since 2012 served the European Commission as Digital Champion of Sweden, advising the European Commission on Digitalization politics. He was one of the 11 members of the Lamy group Evaluating the European Union framework program Horizon 2020 and formulating the input to Horizon Europe. In 2000 he founded and chaired the first NordiCHI conference and chaired the NordiCHI organization during its first twenty years — NordiCHI is now one of the biggest regional HCI conferences in the world and runs biannually. He is currently the vice president of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). He was the general chair of INTERACT 2009 and is an IFIP TC13 pioneer, an IFIP silver core recipient, and an IFIP fellow. He founded HCSE — the Human-Centered Software Engineering conference — that runs biannually since 2005. He has been an editorial board member of Interacting with Computers and the Springer Journal Universal Access in the Information Society.

Björn Hartmann — University of California, Berkeley, USA

Björn Hartmann is an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is broadly interested in tools to support human ingenuity, across a number of domains including design, programming, and engineering. Methodologically, his group predominantly focuses on systems research: they contribute complex, working interactive systems that embody research ideas and test specific hypotheses. He currently holds the Paul and Judy Gray Alumni Presidential Chair in Engineering Excellence at UC Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, and an MSE in Computer and Information Science as well as undergraduate degrees in Digital Media Design and Communication from the University of Pennsylvania.

Gillian R. Hayes — University of California, Irvine, USA

Gillian R. Hayes is the Vice Provost for Graduate Education, Dean of the Graduate Division at UC Irvine and Robert A. and Barbara L. Kleist Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She is a computer scientist with expertise in human-computer interaction, assistive and educational technologies, and health informatics. She designs and evaluates digital tools to support vulnerable populations of children and is the author of over 100 publications and two books. She has been a Kavli Fellow with the National Academy of Science in the U.S. and a Jacobs Foundation Senior Fellow. She is a distinguished member of the ACM and was the recipient of the SIGCHI Social Impact Award in 2019. She is an alumna of Vanderbilt University and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Azra Ismail — Emory University, USA

Azra Ismail is an Assistant Professor in Biomedical Informatics and Global Health at Emory University. Her research is on the design of AI-driven systems that target health equity for marginalized communities and care workers, and draws on feminist and postcolonial perspectives to critically analyze AI efforts. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she engages in ethnographic fieldwork, participatory design, system development, and evaluation. Her research has entailed developing long-term relationships with communities, non-profit health organizations, and industry actors. Azra is also the co-founder of MakerGhat, an education nonprofit in India that aims to nurture the next generation of leaders and entrepreneurs from underserved communities.

Julie A. Kientz — University of Washington, USA

Julie A. Kientz is a professor and chair of the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington, where she directs the Computing for Healthy and Inclusive Living and Learning Lab. Her research focuses on understanding and reducing the user burdens of interactive technologies for health, education, and families through the design of future applications. Her primary research methods involve human-centered design, technology development, and a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. She has designed, developed, and evaluated mobile, sensor, and social applications for numerous areas in the health, education, and family domains. The populations she has designed with in her research include individuals and families managing sleep health, parents of young children monitoring developmental progress, families managing screen time and remote learning, adolescents managing stress, and inclusive education teachers and therapists working with neurodiverse children. Dr. Kientz received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008.

Vassilis Kostakos — University of Melbourne, Australia

Vassilis Kostakos is a professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Melbourne. He previously held roles at the University of Oulu, University of Madeira, Carnegie Mellon University, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Bath. His research on ubiquitous computing and social computing looks at ways to capture and understand human behavior, placing emphasis on creating reusable tools for researchers. He has been a Marie Curie Fellow and a Fellow of the Academy of Finland Distinguished Professor program. He was one of the founding editors of the PACM IMWUT journal. He has proudly supervised many researchers and Ph.D. students to graduation.

James Landay — Stanford University, USA

James Landay is a professor of computer science and the Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. He co-founded and is Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). Landay and his students/collaborators have made research contributions in many areas of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), including technology to support behavior change, demonstrational interfaces, mobile & ubiquitous computing, and user interface design tools. Landay is well known for founding and building vibrant HCI and human-centered AI research communities at Berkeley, Washington, and Stanford. Landay previously was a tenured faculty member at Cornell Tech, the University of Washington, and UC Berkeley. He was also Director of Intel Labs Seattle and co-founder of NetRaker. While on sabbatical at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, he taught at Tsinghua University. Landay received his BS in EECS from UC Berkeley, and MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy and an ACM Fellow. He served on the NSF CISE Advisory Committee for six years.

Wendy Mackay — INRIA, France

Wendy Mackay is a Research Director, Classe Exceptionnelle (DR0) and a Professor Attaché at the Université Paris-Saclay. She directs the ex)situ research group in Human-Computer Interaction joint between Inria, Paris-Saclay and the Université Paris-Saclay. She teaches in the HCI international Masters degree program at the university. She arrived at Inria in 2000 and was appointed as the 2021–2022 Visiting Chair for Computer Science for the Collège de France. She is a Doctor Honoris Causa at Aarhus University and served for three years as Vice President of Research for the University of Paris-Sud Computer Science Department. She spent two years as a Visiting Professor at Stanford University in the Computer Science Department. She received her Ph.D. from MIT and has served as Chair of ACM/SIGCHI, co-editor–in-chief of the journal IJHCS, was general chair of the CHI 2013 conference, and received the ACM/SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award for Service. She is an ACM Fellow and received a European Research Council Advanced Grant, a five-year multi-million Euro grant, in 2012. Her current research interests include co-adaptive instruments, tangible computing, and multi-disciplinary, participatory design methods.

Amy Ogan — Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Amy Ogan is the Thomas and Lydia Moran Professor of Learning Science at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, with an appointment at Carnegie Mellon University Africa. She focuses on ways to make learning experiences more effective and engaging, with a commitment to designing culturally-responsive technology solutions that are appropriate for the infrastructure and context of the learners and addressing the root causes of inequality in educational opportunity. Over the past decade, she has conducted field research on the deployment of educational technology across four continents, involving tens of thousands of individuals and families, and has collaborated with dozens of ed tech companies developing local solutions. Dr. Ogan’s training as an educational technologist spans many disciplines, with degrees in Computer Science, modern languages, and a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction supported by a fellowship from the Institute of Education Sciences. She has been named a Rising Star in EECS by MIT, a World Economic Forum Young Scientist; she received the McCandless Chair at CMU and has been awarded the Jacobs Early Career Fellowship to study the use of educational technologies in emerging economies. She was the founding co-chair of the Learning, Education and Families subcommittee at ACM CHI and the Program Chair for AIED 2019 and Learning@Scale 2021, and was previously a visiting researcher at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her research is supported by the Mastercard Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Google, the J.S. McDonnell Foundation, and the Jacobs Foundation.

Shwetak Patel — University of Washington, USA

Shwetak Patel is the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, where he directs the Ubicomp Lab. Concurrently, he is also a Distinguished Scientist and Head of Health Technologies at Google. His work focuses on the application of computing to health, sustainability, and interaction. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2008. He is also a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Sloan Fellowship, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, MIT TR-35 Award, World Economic Forum Young Global Scientist Award, NSF CAREER Award, PECASE award, and the ACM Prize in Computing. He is also an ACM Fellow. Shwetak was a co-founder of a home energy monitoring company called Zensi (acquired by Belkin in 2010), a low-power home wireless sensing company called SNUPI Technologies (acquired by Sears in 2015), and a mobile health company called Senosis Health (acquired by Google in 2017).

Courtney N. Reed — Loughborough University London, UK

Courtney N. Reed is a lecturer (assistant professor) at Loughborough University London (UK) and a semi-professional vocalist. Incorporating experiences from her own artistic and pedagogical practices, her research examines the entangled relationships between humans, bodies, instruments, and technology in music interaction. She is interested in the dynamics between vocalist and voice, as both body and instrument, and has developed an open-source platform for vocal electromyography to explore how biosignal feedback changes understanding and perception of the body in vocal performance. Her work also incorporates feminist and post-human theories, exploring the sociopolitical contexts within which arts technology is used, aiming to further design for creativity and acknowledge individual, messy bodies in artistic practice. Courtney is also a passionate educator and especially enjoys leading audio programming and introductory coding courses and workshops to make digital technology accessible to students working in various disciplines, especially the arts.

Kate Starbird — University of Washington, USA

Kate Starbird is an associate professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington (UW). Kate’s research sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction and the field of crisis informatics — i.e. the study of how social media and other information-communication technologies are used during crisis events. Currently, her work focuses on the production and spread of online rumors, misinformation, and disinformation during crises and other breaking news events, including elections. In particular, she develops and deploys methods for conducting rapid research to help resolve rumors as they unfold and investigates the participatory nature of disinformation campaigns, exploring both top-down and bottom-up dynamics. Dr. Starbird received her BS in Computer Science from Stanford in 1997 and her Ph.D. in Technology, Media and Society from the University of Colorado in 2012. She is a co-founder and currently serves as director of the UW Center for an Informed Public, which works through research, education, and policy recommendations to strengthen democratic discourse by building resilience to online misinformation and manipulation.

Nicholas Vincent — Simon Fraser University, Canada

Nick Vincent is an assistant professor in computing science at Simon Fraser University. His research focuses on studying the relationship between human-generated data and modern computing technologies, including systems often referred to as “AI”. The overarching goal of this research agenda is to work towards an ecosystem of widely beneficial, highly capable AI technologies that mitigate inequalities in wealth and power rather than exacerbate them. His work touches on concepts such as “data dignity”, “data as labor”, “data leverage”, and “data dividends”.

Ryen W. White — Microsoft Research, USA

Ryen White is General Manager and Deputy Lab Director at Microsoft Research Redmond. His research at the intersection of human-computer interaction and information retrieval has focused on understanding people’s interactions with information and developing innovative solutions to help improve search outcomes and address societal challenges (e.g., in health and wellness). Ryen’s research has enhanced many Microsoft products, including Bing, Office, and Windows. He is an ACM Fellow and he has received many technical accolades in IR and in HCI (e.g., at SIGCHI, INTERACT, UMAP, etc.). Ryen is a member of the SIGIR Academy and he helped establish the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR) in cooperation with SIGCHI.

Yixin Zou — Max Planck Institute, Germany

Yixin Zou (she/her) is a tenure-track faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP), leading the human-centered security and privacy group. Her research interests span human-computer interaction, privacy, and security, focusing on improving consumers’ adoption of protective behaviors and supporting the digital safety of at-risk populations. Her research has been recognized with the 2022 John Karat Usable Privacy and Security Student Research Award and best paper awards/honorable mentions at the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) and the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). In addition, her research has generated broader impacts on industry practice (e.g., at Mozilla and NortonLifeLock) and public policy, including the rulemaking process for the California Consumer Privacy Act. She holds a Ph.D. in Information from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor’s degree in Advertising from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.