Biography

Jennifer Mankoff is the Richard E. Ladner Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Her research is focused on giving people the voice, tools and agency to advocate for themselves. She strives to bring both structural and personal perspectives to her work. For example, her recent work in the intersection of mental health and discrimination uses sensed data to explore how external risks and pressures interact with people’s responses to challenging moments. Similarly, her work in fabrication of accessible technologies considers not only innovative tools that can enable individual makers but also the larger clinical and sociological challenges to disseminating and sharing designs. Jennifer received her PhD at Georgia Tech, advised by Gregory Abowd and Scott Hudson, and her B.A. from Oberlin College.
Her previous faculty positions include UC Berkeley’s EECS department and Carnegie Mellon’s HCI Institute. Jennifer has been recognized with an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, IBM Faculty Fellowship and Best Paper awards from ASSETS, CHI and Mobile HCI. Some supporters of her research include Autodesk, Google Inc., the Intel Corporation, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft Corporation and the National Science Foundation.