Bridging Past and Future

Elizabeth Churchill, Director of User Experience at Google, is an applied social scientist working in human computer interaction, computer mediated communication, mobile/ubiquitous computing and social media. Prior to joining Google, Elizabeth was Director of Human Computer Interaction at eBay Research Labs, and she has held positions in top research organizations, including Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research; Senior Research Scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); and Senior Research Scientist at FX Palo Laboratory. Trained in psychology, 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 on creating online collaboration tools, applications and services for mobile and personal devices, and media installations in public spaces for distributed collaboration and communication. She has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications, one co-authored book (Foundations for Designing User Centered Systems with Frank Ritter and Gordon Baxter) and co-edited 5 books. She is currently completing a co-authored book, Designing with Data: Improving User Experience with Large Scale User Testing. Elizabeth holds a BSc in Experimental Psychology and an MSc in Knowledge Based Systems from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Cambridge. She is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and served as the Executive Vice President of ACM SigCHI from 2009-2015. She serves on the advisory board for a number of university departments and is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Media X, the industry affiliate program to Stanford’s H-STAR Institute.