All of the organizers are active HCI educators and researchers and play key roles in promoting the development of the HCI living curriculum. Additionally, three of the organizers are lead authors on previous research articles on HCI education referenced in the Background section.
Olivier St-Cyr is an Assistant Professor, Teaching-Stream in the Faculty of Information – iSchool at the University of Toronto, in Toronto Canada. He is the liaison for the iSchool User Experience Design (UXD) concentration. His research interests lie in the areas of HCI education and HCI curriculum development. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, he spent eight years working in industry on HCI related projects.
Craig M. MacDonald is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at Pratt Institute where he developed and coordinates the Master of Science in Information Experience Design and User Experience advanced certificate programs. He holds a Ph.D. in Information Studies and Human-Computer Interaction from Drexel University and his research interests cover three broad themes: (1) understanding UX practices in different domains; (2) improving HCI/UX evaluation methodologies; and (3) strengthening HCI/UX education.
Elizabeth F. Churchill is a Director of User Experience at Google focused on designer and developer tools for the connected ecosystems of the Social Web and Internet of Things. Elizabeth has been a research leader at well-known corporate R&D organizations including Fuji Xerox’s research lab in Silicon Valley (FXPAL), the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), eBay Research Labs in San Jose, and Yahoo! in Santa Clara, California. A Distinguished Scientist and Speaker of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a member of the CHI Academy, Elizabeth is the current Secretary/Treasurer of the ACM.
Jennifer J. Preece is a Fellow of the ACM SIGCHI Academy and a Professor at the College of Information Studies – Maryland’s iSchool, where she was Dean (2005-2015). She is co-author of the most widely-used textbook in HCI, Interaction Design: Beyond Human Computer Interaction (4th Edition, John Wiley & Sons, 2015). She is author, coauthor, or editor of seven other books including one of the first texts in HCI, Human-Computer Interaction (1994), as well as numerous journal and conference papers. Her heavily cited research covers online and networked communities, citizen science, informal environmental education, HCI design, data sharing, HCI education, and cross-cultural participation.
Anne Bowser is an Innovation Specialist at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Between 2011 and 2014 she worked as a Student Researcher with the SIGCHI Project on HCI Education while earning her PhD from the University of Maryland’s iSchool. At the Wilson Center, Anne seeks to understand how technologies and research practices can be developed to best maximize benefits and minimize risks for a range of actors including the general public. Building off her earlier work with the SIGCHI Project on HCI Education, Anne continues to build and seed communities in and beyond the federal government.