Leah Findlater

The Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) is pleased to announce the promotion of Dr. Leah Findlater to Associate Professor with tenure, effective at the beginning of the 2019–2020 academic year.

Dr. Findlater directs the Inclusive Design Lab, where she works with an interdisciplinary team of students from HCDE, the Information School, and Computer Science & Engineering, to ensure that the next generation of mobile and wearable technologies are designed to meet the needs of the broadest range of users. Her research looks at how to create technologies that adapt to accommodate individual user needs and preferences, whether to improve basic interactions such as touchscreen text entry or more complex tasks such as working with machine learning models.

Findlater's current research projects are aimed at advancing wearable sound awareness techniques for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and at studying the design of devices and interfaces that use voice interaction. 

Before joining the HCDE faculty in 2017, Dr. Findlater was on the faculty at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies, and spent two years as an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at the UW Information School. Findlater's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Nokia, Mozilla, and Google.