Elizabeth Churchill

Bio

Dr. Elizabeth Churchill is a an applied social scientist working in the area of social media, interaction design and mobile/ubiquitous computing. She is currently Director of Human Computer Interaction at eBay Research Labs (ERL) in San Jose, California.

She was formerly a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, where she founded, staffed and managed the Internet Experiences Group. Until September of 2006, she worked at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), California, in the Computing Science Lab (CSL). Prior to that she formed and led the Social Computing Group at FX Palo Laboratory, Fuji Xerox’s research lab in Palo Alto.

Originally a psychologist by training, throughout her career Elizabeth has focused on understanding people’s social and collaborative interactions in their everyday digital and physical contexts. She has studied, designed and collaborated in creating online collaboration tools (e.g. virtual worlds, collaboration/chat spaces), applications and services for mobile and personal devices, and media installations in public spaces for distributed collaboration and communication. In addition to being instrumental in the creation of innovative technologies, she has contributed to academic research through her publications in theoretical and applied psychology, cognitive science, human-computer interaction and computer supported cooperative work. With over 100 peer reviewed publications and 5 edited books, topics she has written about include implicit learning, human-agent systems, mixed initiative dialogue systems, social aspects of information seeking, digital archive and memory, and the development of emplaced media spaces. She has been a regular columnist for ACM interactions since 2008.

Elizabeth has a BSc in Experimental Psychology, an MSc in Knowledge Based Systems, both from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Cambridge. In 2010, she was recognised as a Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Elizabeth s the current Executive Vice President of ACM SigCHI (Human Computer Interaction Special Interest Group). She is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Media X, the industry affiliate program to Stanford’s H-STAR Institute.