Orit Shaer 323

Orit Shaer is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and co-director of the Media Arts and Sciences Program at Wellesley College. She founded and directs the Wellesley College Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab. Her research focuses on next generation user interfaces including virtual and augmented reality, tangible, gestural, tactile, and multi touch interaction.

Current projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and by industry grants include the design and evaluation of smart environments for collaborative decision-making, the design and evaluation of novel interactive visualizations for personal genomics, the development of computational tools for enhancing learning and innovation in bio-design, and the conceptualization and prototyping of interactive STEM exhibits for discovery museums.

Shaer received her Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Tufts University. She has been a research fellow in the Design Machine Group at the University of Washington and in the University College London Interaction Center.

She is a recipient of several NSF and industry awards including the prestigious NSF CAREER Award, Agilent Technologies Research Award, and Google App Engine Education Award. At Wellesley she was awarded the Pinanski Prize for Excellent Teaching. Shaer has served on dozens of program committees, editorial boards, and review panels, including NSF division of Computers in Science and Engineering, ACM CHI, UIST, and TEI conferences, and the editorial board of Foundations and Trends in Human Computer Interaction. She chaired the ACM conference on Interactive Surfaces and Tabletops (2012) and currently serves as a program chair of the ACM Conference on Tangible Embodied and Embedded Interaction (2017).