Elizabeth Churchill

An ACM Fellow, CHI Academy member, and an ACM distinguished speaker, Professor Elizabeth F. Churchill is an active contributor to the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Her work spans academia and industry, consistently focusing on the social, psychological, and practical aspects of technology use. In more recent years, her work has focused on technology product and platform development practices.

Prior to joining MBZUAI, Professor Churchill built research teams at Google, eBay, Yahoo, PARC and FujiXerox. Her background is in psychology, artificial intelligence and cognitive science. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and honorary doctorates from the University of Sussex and the University of Stockholm.

In 2016, she received a Citris-Banatao Institute Athena Award for Women in Technology for her Executive Leadership. She received ACM SIGCHI's Lifetime Service Award (2023) and ACM's Lifetime Practice Award (2024). As an industry scientist, she has been regularly recognized to be one of the top women leaders in User Experience (UX).

She served as the ACM's Vice President from 2018-2020, and as ACM’s Secretary Treasurer before that from 2016-2018.

• Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the University of Cambridge, UK
• Master of Science in Knowledge-Based Systems from University of Sussex, UK
• Bachelor of Science in Experimental Psychology from the University of Sussex, UK

Selected Accolades Churchill has received include:

• ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award (2024)
• ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award (2023)
• ACM Fellow (2019): For contributions to human-computer interaction and service to the ACM
• ACM CHI Academy (elected member, 2017)
• Citris-Banatao Institute Athena Award for Women in Technology for Executive Leadership (2016)
• ACM Distinguished Scientist and Distinguished Speaker (2016)

 

Honorary Doctorates:

• University of Sussex (2018) for continued contributions to the sciences underlying creative technology development.
• University of Stockholm (2019) for sustained impact on the field of Human Computer Interaction and Social Computing.

Churchill is the author of over 200 peer-reviewed publications that have received more than 16,000 citations and an h-index of 68. For a list of publications please refer to Google Scholar or her ACM Author Profile listed below.

She has also held a number of editorial positions and is currently Co-editor in Chief of ACM’s Interactions magazine (https://interactions.acm.org/).  

Books:

• Rochelle King, Elizabeth F Churchill, and Caitlin Tan. Designing with Data: Improving the User Experience with A/B Testing Apr 20, 2017, O’Reilly
• F. Ritter, G. Baxter and E. Churchill. Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems: What System Designers Need to Know about People. May 2014, Springer
• K. O’Hara, M. Perry, E.F. Churchill and D. Russell. (Eds) Public and Situated Displays. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003
• D. Snowdon, E. F. Churchill and E. Frecon (Eds) Inhabited Information Spaces. Springer Verlag, 2003
• Y.Ye and E.F. Churchill (Eds) Agent Supported Cooperative Work. Mass ,USA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003
• E.F. Churchill, D. Snowdon and A. Munro (Eds). Collaborative Virtual Environments. Digital Places and Spaces for Interaction. London, UK: Springer Verlag, 2001
• J. Cassell, J. Sullivan, S. Prevost, and E. Churchill (Eds.). Embodied Conversational Agents. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000

 

Recent Short Conference Publications:

• Ishii, H., Mekler, E. D., Churchill, E. F., & Shneiderman, B. (2025). The churns and turns of HCI: Which CHI papers make the most impact in an ever-growing sea of HCI publications. In CHI Extended Abstracts 2025.
• Mohanty, V., Fang, J., Lee-Kan, S. M., Alavi, H. S., Salas, J., Patterson, G., Wu, C. C., Shamma, D. A., & Churchill, E. F. (2024). Sustaining scalable sustainability: Human-centered green technology for community-wide carbon reduction. In CHI Extended Abstracts 2024.
• Elagroudy, P., Li, J., Väänänen, K., Lukowicz, P., Ishii, H., Mackay, W. E., & Churchill, E. F. (2024). Transforming HCI Research Cycles using Generative AI and “Large Whatever Models” (LWMs). In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '24). ACM.
• Huang, E. J., Garg, K., Gómez-Zará, D., Hui, J., Kulkarni, C., Massimi, M., & Churchill, E. F. (2023). Supporting workers in developing effective collaboration skills for complex work. In Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.
• Wang, D., Churchill, E., Maes, P., Fan, X., Shneiderman, B., Shi, Y., & Wang, Q. (2020). From human-human collaboration to Human-AI collaboration: Designing AI systems that can work together with people. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM.

 

Recent Magazine Publications:

• Churchill, E. F., & Wiberg, M. (2025, April). Spatiality, deepfakes, and life. interactions, 32(3).
• Churchill, E. F., & Wiberg, M. (2025, February). Tapping Into AI—Why HCI Is Critical. interactions, 32(2).
• Churchill, E. F., & Wiberg, M. (2025, January). Human augmentation: A paradigm shift for HCI? interactions, 32(1).
• Churchill, E. F., & Wiberg, M. (2024, October). Global, green, and generative design. interactions, 31(6).
• Churchill, E. F., & Wiberg, M. (2024, August). Design for all, design by all. interactions, 31(5).
• Churchill, E. F., & Wiberg, M. (2024, June). UX for RAI: User experience meets responsible AI. interactions, 31(4).
• Churchill, E. F., & Wiberg, M. (2024, May). Speaking human—Beyond humanizing AI. interactions, 31(3).
• Churchill, E. F., & Wiberg, M. (2024, February). Infrastructures for interactions. interactions, 31(2).
• Churchill, E. F., & Wiberg, M. (2024, January). From humans to AI: A timely debate on human-AI relations. interactions, 31(1).
• Churchill, E. F., & Wiberg, M. (2023). Some food for thought and some (digital) things to digest. interactions, 30(4), 18–21.

 

Patents:

Churchill holds over 60 patents that are granted or pending.

• Google Patent Search
• Patentdocs