John M. Carroll was a member of the Virginia Tech HCI community from 1994 to 2003. His research focused on methods and theory in human-computer interaction, particularly as applied to Internet tools for collaborative learning and problem solving, and design of interactive information systems. He is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. His most recent books are Innovative Practices in Teaching Information Sciences and Technology (Vol. 2; Springer, 2024) and Coproducting Care: Synergies of Reciprocity (Springer, 2025). He is editor of the Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics. He received the Rigo Award and the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award from ACM, the Silver Core Award from IFIP, the Goldsmith Award from IEEE, an honorary doctorate in engineering from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and the Faculty Scholar Medal in Social and Behavioral Science from Penn State. He is a fellow of AAAS, ACM, IEEE, IFIP, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, the Psychonomics Society, the Society for Technical Communication, and the Association for Psychological Science. In 2021, he received the Pioneer in HCI Award from IFIP TC13.

Doug A. Bowman has been a member of the Center for HCI since arriving at Virginia Tech in 1999, and served as CHCI Director from 2011-2025. During his time as Director, CHCI grew to a community of over 80 faculty affiliates from all corners of the university, became an institute-level center within the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, and opened up formal membership to students for the first time. He instituted the CHCI planning grant program and oversaw other funding programs that help facilitate innovative, interdisciplinary HCI research across the center. His own research is in the area of user experience for virtual reality and augmented reality systems. His research contributions have been recognized with awards such as the ISMAR Career Impact Award and the IEEE VGTC Technical Achievement Award in Virtual Reality. Having handed over the reins of the Center, he is excited to lead new initiatives around the topic of intelligent XR.

Roger W. Ehrich was a member of the Virginia Tech HCI community from 1976 to 2010. During that time, his research focused on human-computer dialogue and human-computer interface design, digital picture processing, data compression, and computer vision. He also directed a 3-year project called "PCs for Families" to integrate technology into 6th-grade families and their children's classrooms. He authored more than 60 publications, including the book, “Human-Computer Dialogue Design,” and made significant contributions to research on digital picture processing and image analysis. He was instrumental in securing the department’s first time-shared computers and implementing the university’s first interdepartmental computer network. He served as the director of the Computer Science Computational Laboratory, director of the Spatial Data Analysis Laboratory, director of the Institute of Information Technology at Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technologies, and acting director of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction.

Edward A. Fox (Ed) was a member of the Virginia Tech HCI community from 1983 through his retirement in December 2024. During that time, his research focused on helping people work with information. That led to becoming a Fellow of ACM and IEEE, as well as induction into the ACM SIGIR Academy, for helping launch the field of digital libraries, advancing the field of information retrieval, and building many (multimedia/ hypermedia) information systems to enhance search, Web archiving, and education. He devised the 5S (Societies, Scenarios, Spaces, Structures, and Streams) framework to describe, generate, and improve information and other systems. He continues as Founder and Executive Director of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, helping make graduate research around the world easily accessible.  He is currently an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, still active in CHCI as well as the Sanghani Center, Whole Health Consortium, Global Change Center, Invasive Species Collaborative, and Center for Autism Research. When his two remaining doctoral students finish, he will have advised 108 graduate students with the support of 147 sponsored research projects.

Steve Harrison was a member of the Virginia Tech HCI community from 2003 to 2021, during which he was the Director of the Human-Centered Design Program, an associate professor of practice in Computer Science, and co-director of the Social Informatics area of the CHCI. Design has been a connecting element of his various careers: he is a registered architect in California, was an architect at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and before coming to VT, a research scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (“PARC”). He has studied the practices of design, has created tools for remote design collaboration, and is an award-winning designer. He edited two books, authored numerous peer-reviewed publications, designed award-winning interactive STEM exhibits, chaired the ACM SigCHI Design subcommittee, co-chaired the ACM Design of Interactive Systems ("DIS") conferences in 2014 and 2019, and was the director of the DIS Conference Steering Committee. He is very proud of the students who came to see computing differently through the classes he taught and the research they conducted. Officially retired, he is quite busy with a number of residential design and construction projects — and his impending role as a grandparent. (But, he did find time to hike the West Highland Trail in Scotland.)

Rex Hartson founded HCI within the Computer Science Department in 1979. This emerging work in HCI got a huge boost when a large (by currents standards then) NSF grant was awarded to Hartson and others, allowing them to build substantial lab facilities and to support numerous research students. Hartson focused on methods and tools to support usability engineering, now expanded in scope to be known as UX design. This work included the development of usability engineering support tools, such as usability evaluation data gathering and data analysis tools, and the User Action Framework, a theory-based, structured usability knowledge base for use by practitioners in usability problem diagnosis. He also worked on remote usability evaluation tools (for gathering critical incident and usability problem data from on-line usage in real task environments). Hartson's academic research, which evolved into the study of UX design as a full lifecycle process, was grounded in over 30 years of collaboration with usability practitioners in real-world development organizations, with dozens of consulting and UX design training clients in business, industry, government, and the military.  He retired from Virginia Tech in May, 2002, when he became Professor Emeritus. His most recent accomplishment in HCI is the publication of The UX Book, 3e: Agile UX design for a quality user experience (co-authored with his former Ph.D. student, Pardha Pyla, Morgan-Kaufmann, 2025). He also conducted collaborative HCI/UX teaching and research at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

Debby Hix was a member of the Virginia Tech HCI community from its fledgling beginnings around 1979 until her retirement in 2014.  She received her M.I.S. in 1981 and her Ph.D. in 1985 from the Computer Science Department. She was the first woman to receive a Computer Science Ph.D. at Virginia Tech, 15 years after the CS Department was founded. During that time, her research focused on the structure of human-computer interaction, processes for producing more usable user interfaces, and ultimately usability engineering (UX).  Outside her computer science life, she was certified in 2000 as a Music Practitioner, hired by local hospices and hospitals to play live therapeutic harp music to individuals at bedside, and continued this into her retirement.  She travels extensively, having been to all seven continents and recently visited her eightieth country.

Andrea Kavanaugh was a founding member of the Virginia Tech Center for HCI in 1995. At that time, she was the Director of Research for the VT community computer network project known as the Blacksburg Electronic Village (the BEV).  She served as Assistant Director and then Associate Director (and Senior Research Scientist) for each of the HCI Center’s directors; she also served twice as Interim Director. As a social scientist with an urban informatics background, her research has focused on the use and social impact of computing on social and political participation in geographic communities. Some of her close collaborators over the years include Jack Carroll, Mary Beth Rosson, Manuel Perez, Naren Ramakrishnan, Ed Fox, and Deborah Tatar. She is a former officer of the Board member of the Digital Government Society that grew out of the NSF program of the same name, and served until last month as an Associate Editor of the ACM journal Digital Government Research Practice. She is currently working on a book (under contract with Cambridge University Press) examining the impact on civic engagement in communities of the loss of traditional local media, the explosion in online information sources (as well as misinformation) and the rise of generative artificial intelligence.

Mary Beth Rosson was a member of the Virginia Tech HCI community from 1994 to 2003. During that time, her research focused on end-user programming, technology-supported collaborative learning, and community networks. In parallel, Rosson developed courses, tools and resources for HCI education, including a textbook on scenario-based usability engineering; the Scenario Browser; and the Multimedia Library of Usability Case Studies.  In 2003 she moved to the Information School at Penn State, where she continued to investigate practices and tools for informal software development and collaborative computing. In addition to her contributions to HCI research and education, Rosson served in academic leadership positions, focusing primarily on innovation in undergraduate education at Virginia Tech and on graduate education at Penn State. In recognition of her contributions to HCI research, education and the profession, Rosson was elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2007, and was named an ACM Fellow in 2021. In 2023, Rosson retired from Penn State and holds the rank of Penn State Professor Emerita.

Deborah Tatar, Emerita Professor Computer Science and Psychology, Virginia Tech, started her career at the Logo Lab, which was then part of the AI Lab at M.I.T. She went on to become a Senior Software Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation, and a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC, where she worked on one of the first projects to support face-to-face use of computers in work. Her doctoral work, in Psychology at Stanford, was concerned with social and personal effects of distraction in conversation. Subsequently and especially at VT, most of her research has been concerned with designing and studying either classroom use of technology or people’s relationships to one another in the presence of novel technologies. Her recent theoretical work has advanced the theory of machine intransigence and human malleability. Recent work with students has reconceptualized our understanding of the nature of trust in technology by considering the life-and-death decisions in removing land mines in Colombia, and reconsidered the meaning of “progress”, “contributions” and “novelty” in technology R&D through the lens of asset-based development with women rescued from sex-trafficking in Nepal. She is currently looking for people interested in contributing to an edited volume with the tentative title “Molded by the Code: Human Malleability in a Digital World”, to come out from Ethics International Press. 

Bob Williges started his career in academia at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a human factors engineer before joining Virginia Tech in 1976, where he started as a full professor in two disciplines, industrial engineering and psychology. He became a full professor of computer science in 1992 and assumed the Ralph H. Bogle Professorship of Industrial and Systems Engineering in 1996.  He was the founder and director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at Virginia Tech. In 1979, he started human-computer interaction research with faculty colleagues in computer science – specifically Roger Erich and Rex Hartson whom we’re also celebrating today. From their pioneering work, human-computer interaction emerged as a field of study in the early 1980s, as well as an internationally-recognized strength at Virginia Tech. Bob made significant contributions to research on human-computer interaction, computer-based training procedures, human factors research methodology, technology for computer users with disabilities, human factors engineering in manufacturing, and emerging human-computer interfaces involving visualization and computer-based conferencing. He authored over 275 scientific publications and made more than 190 technical presentations at national and international scientific meetings. We lost Bob in 2020, but his impact and legacy both in ISE and HCI lives on.

Stacy Branham was a member of the Virginia Tech HCI community from 2007 to 2014. During that time, her research focused on interpersonal communication technologies, but her service was devoted to ensuring that women felt belonging in computing. When her postdoctoral studies introduced her to digital accessibility needs of blind individuals, she pivoted to Accessible Computing research. Today, she is an Associate Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. In her research and service, she creates technologies with disabled people that enable them to thrive in computing and in higher education, so they can lead the way to a more inclusive digital future. Branham is Co-PI of NSF AccessComputing, a national initiative to teach digital accessibility to the next generation of technologists. She is also a member of the Computing Research Association’s Education board, where she leads a national effort to assess digital accessibility of college computing classrooms. She is Technical Program Chair for the 2026 ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility and an Associate Editor of the ACM TOCHI journal. She lives with her husband, also a CHCI alum, and their two children in Southern California––where she occasionally misses the snow, but always the people in Southwest Virginia.

Ryan P. McMahan received all three of his degrees (B.S. in 2004, M.S. in 2007, and Ph.D. in 2011) in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, specializing in virtual environments and reality under the guidance of Dr. Doug Bowman. He earned his tenure at the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas), after serving as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science from 2012 to 2018 and winning a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 2016. From 2019 to 2024, he served as an Associate Professor of Computer Science and the Associate Program Director for the Mixed Reality Engineering Graduate Certificate at the University of Central Florida (UCF). In 2024, he returned to Virginia Tech as a Professor of Computer Science and the Deputy Director of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction (CHCI). In August 2025, he became the Director of CHCI. McMahan has contributed to over $4M in research funding awards, with personal credit for over $2.5M. He has numerous highly cited publications and has won Best Paper and Honorable Mention Awards at ACM CHI and IEEE VR, respectively. His research currently focuses on the intersection of extended reality and artificial intelligence. 

Dr. Cheryl D. Seals, the Charles E. Barkley Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Auburn University, is a distinguished researcher, educator, and leader with over 25 years of experience, including 21 years as Auburn faculty and five years in industry at Bellcore/Telcordia and IBM. An alumna of Grambling State University, North Carolina A&T State University, and Virginia Tech (PhD), Dr. Seals has contributed significantly to her academic community through leadership roles, program committees, advisory boards, and service as faculty advisor to multiple student organizations. Her research program focuses on Advanced Learning Technologies, emphasizing user-centered design, participatory evaluation, and immersive experiences. With nearly $20M in collaborative funding and over 130 publications, her work spans eLearning, teacher education, computational linguistics, and mixed-reality applications. Projects have supported disciplines such as pharmacy, civil engineering, building science, communication disorders, and medicine through VR and AR innovations. Dr. Seals has mentored over 200 graduate and undergraduate students, graduating 23 Ph.D. and 78 master’s students. She has also co-led NSF-funded initiatives including IAAMCS and STARS, both aimed at supporting computing availability for all, fostering mentorship, leadership, outreach, and research training across diverse communities.

Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Corbett was a member of the Virginia Tech HCI community from 2021 to 2024. During that time, his research focused on security and privacy issues in augmented reality.  He is currently a research team leader at the U.S. Army Cyber Institute (ACI) at West Point, NY and has recently focused on integrating human biofeedback into battlefield command systems and AI-integrated cybersecurity. Matthew leads a diverse group of military and civilian researchers, with projects ranging from human factors in cybersecurity, AI-enabled cybersecurity and simulation, and tactical decision support systems research. Matthew also enjoys traveling and spending time with his wife Meghan and two children, Reagan and Connor.

Missie Smith was a member of the Virginia Tech HCI community from 2013 to 2018. During that time, her research focused on human factors, cognitive engineering, and how immersive technologies influence human information processing. She earned her PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering, with work that examined user perception and performance when using emerging interfaces. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Auburn University, where she directs the Cognitive Engineering and Context (CEC) Lab. Her research lies at the intersection of engineering, design, and public policy, with applications to the safe use of augmented reality technologies in domains such as automotive, aviation, and consumer goods. She was recently named a Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) Science Policy Fellow, underscoring her efforts to connect technical research with broader regulatory and societal considerations. Before joining Auburn, she worked as a Research Scientist at Meta Reality Labs, where she developed AR/VR safety guidelines to inform design standards across hardware and software development. Dr. Smith also serves in leadership roles across the immersive-technology research community, including IEEE ISMAR, IEEE VR, and HFES. A dedicated mentor, she has guided more than 150 early career researchers whose contributions now span academia, industry, and government.

Sukrit Venkatagiri was a member of the Virginia Tech HCI community from 2017 to 2022. During that time, his research focused on developing crowdsourcing systems to augment journalists' investigations and studying online content moderation. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Swarthmore College where he directs the Collective Resilience Lab. His research has been published at ACM CSCW, CHI, DIS, FAccT, WWW, and AAAI HCOMP. His work has received the HCOMP 2019 Best Demo Award and been featured in or cited by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, Forbes, among others. Sukrit's work has been supported by an NSF SaTC CRII Award and a Google Award for Inclusion Research. Sukrit currently serves on the ACM CSCW Steering Committee and is the Communications Co-Chair for CSCW 2025. Previously, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, and has worked at Meta and Microsoft Research.