Faculty PhD student recruitment

The following HCDE faculty advise graduate students, and some have provided statements about whether they plan to work with new students in the upcoming year.

Even though faculty capacity and match can change, we particularly encourage you to look into faculty who plan to work with new students, as difficult admission decisions often come down to advising capacity.

Because plans change based on how research progresses, which grants are awarded, and changing commitments for faculty and current students, consider identifying faculty in your application who describe appealing openings and faculty who most strongly match your research interests, even if they are not currently planning to work with new students in the coming year.

Interesting in hearing more about HCDE Faculty research? Watch the recordings from autumn quarter 2024 HCDE Research Speaker Series | Human Centered Design & Engineering.

HCDE Faculty

HCDE Faculty	PhD Recruitment Plan	Open to meetings before application review?
Professor Cecilia Aragon	I am looking to admit 1 new PhD student this coming year who is interested in human-centered data science, human-centered AI, text visualization, or visual analytics. Updated June 2024.
Professor Cindy Atman	I am not recruiting new students.	n/a
Assistant Teaching Professor Arpita B	I am not recruiting new students.	n/a
Assistant Professor Katya Cherukumilli	I am excited to recruit 1-2 PhD students this year who are passionate about advancing equitable access to safe drinking water. Ongoing projects in our Safe Water Equity and Longevity Lab (SWELL) include: (i) developing portable biosensors to monitor dissolved metals in water supplies, (ii) evaluating the impact of campus water infrastructure quality on user perceptions and behaviors, and (iii) interviewing local school district stakeholders to advance efforts to remediate lead-contaminated water fountains. Updated August 2024.	Yes
Assistant Teaching Professor Sarah Coppola	I am not recruiting new students.	n/a
Teaching Professor Brock Craft	I am not recruiting students but may co-advise or serve on committees for students interested in visualization, data science, and interaction design for embedded systems.	n/a
Assistant Professor Sayamindu Dasgupta	I am potentially looking for 1-2 students this year who are interested in designing and studying ways in which young people learn with digital technologies. Updated September 2024.
Associate Professor Leah Findlater	I am potentially looking for 1 new student this year who is interested in accessibility. Updated September 2024.
Associate Teaching Professor Tyler Fox	I am not recruiting new students.	n/a
Assistant Professor Sucheta Ghoshal	I'm looking for 1 student interested in community-centered design and research with intellectual interests in areas including urban farming, critical engagement with smart technologies and AI, place making, critical geography and Black geography. Updated July 2024.
Professor Mark Haselkorn	I am potentially looking for 1 or 2 new students interested in complex region-wide project based on Community-Centered Design. This environment is intended to transform management of the Seattle transportation corridor from a system based on individual agencies (distinct jurisdictions, missions, technologies, policies, practices) to one based on shared data, systems and operational concepts for collaborative regional awareness, coordinated actions, and cooperative information sharing. Current Phase of the project ends December 2023 and future follow-on activities are in the planning stage. Updated July 2023. View Information Session recording.
Assistant Research Professor Shana Hirsch	I am particularly interested in recruiting students who would like to work on emerging conservation technologies (renewable energy, bioacoustics, eDNA, other sensing and monitoring techniques). If you are interested in conducting applied, qualitative research at the intersection of energy and/or environment and society/technology, please reach out with a description of your background and interests. Updated October 2024.	Yes
Associate Professor Gary Hsieh	I am looking to recruit one new student this year on (1) generative AI powered tools to help translate academic insights into actionable resources to help bridge the research and design practice gap and/or broadly to support science communication, or (2) conversational agents and technologies for health and behavior change. Updated October 2024.
Professor Julie Kientz	I am looking to recruit at most one student who is interested in designing and evaluating novel computing technologies with children and families. Updated June 2024.	No
Professor Beth Kolko	I am not recruiting new students.	n/a
Professor Charlotte Lee	I am not recruiting new students.	n/a
Associate Teaching Professor Alan Marks	I am not recruiting new students.	n/a
Professor David W. McDonald	I am planning to admit 1-2 students to start in the Autumn 2025 for the 2025-2026 academic year. I have on-going research in social computing and Human-Centered AI/ML (HCAI). Current social computing projects are studying Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata. Current HCAI projects consider design techniques and tools that leverage AI/ML, HCAI auditing of AI performance, and non-obvious uses of LLMs. I’m looking for students with interests in these topic areas to join me and my current students working in these areas. Updated June 2024. View Information Session recording.
Professor Sean Munson	I anticipate working with at most one new student in academic year 2025-2026, potentially in the areas of adapting human centered design methods for the design of complex health interventions and goal-centered, collaborative approaches to personal informatics. Updated June 2024.	Please read this page about applying to work with Dr. Munson.
Associate Professor Nadya Peek	I'm looking to recruit 1-2 students for work on laboratory automation, synthetic biology, machine building, robotics, computational design, DIYbio, digital fabrication, and human-machine interaction. Updated June 2024. View Information Session recording.	Please read this page about applying to Machine Agency.
Professor David Ribes	I am recruiting 1-2 doctoral students with an interest in the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), infrastructure studies, and especially this year, people with a focus on science policy, international research relations, and/or the nation-state. Updated August 2024.
Professor Daniela Rosner	No plans to recruit new students this coming year. Updated September 2024.	n/a
Professor Kate Starbird	I am looking to recruit one new PhD student who is interested in A) exploring how mis- and disinformation spread online and how we can design solutions to address those issues; or B) conducting ethnographic work on multi-stakeholder data collaborations in the mis/disinformation space. Updated September 2024.
Assistant Professor Emily Tseng Joining HCDE faculty in 2025	I am recruiting 1-2 students to work on projects at the intersection of computer security and privacy and social computing. Specific topics might include (1) redefining computer security and privacy amidst modern sur- and sous-veillance; (2) participatory governance and community control over AI in "high-risk" domains; and (3) how modern language technologies might change how we do qualitative research. See my website for more. Updated October 2024. View Information Session recording.
Professor Jennifer Turns	No plans to recruit new students this coming year.	n/a
Professor Mark Zachry	Not recruiting new student this cycle with the possible exception of someone interested in researching, designing, and building systems to address needs related to the foster care system in the US. Students I am working with now are working on projects related to sensemaking in short form videos, AI-supported design workflows, and AI-powered avatar companions. Updated September 2024.

Adjunct Faculty

The following adjunct faculty (faculty with primary appointments in other departments and who also hold appointments in HCDE) recruit, mentor, and co-advise HCDE PhD students. HCDE requires all doctoral students have an adviser or co-adviser with their primary appointment in HCDE. If you are excited to work with these adjunct faculty, we encourage you to list them in addition to faculty with primary appointments in HCDE in your application.

Adjunct Faculty	Primary Appointment	PhD Recruitment Plan
Assistant Professor Audrey Desjardins	Interaction Design, in the School of Art + Art History + Design	No plans to recruit new students this coming year. Updated June 2024.
Assistant Professor Benjamin Mako Hill	Communication	I am open to working with 1-2 incoming students with an interest in social computing, online communities, and computational social science. I'm particularly interested in working with students to explore questions about digital public goods, online community, community governance, and informal learning. Although my students draw from a range of methodological and epistemological traditions, most do at least some large-scale computational and data scientific analysis. Updated September 2023.
Assistant Professor James Pierce	Interaction Design, in the School of Art + Art History + Design	I’m looking for 2-3 students to work in one or more of the following areas: 1. IoT/smart product design with a focus on trust, control, surveillance, and/or other ethical considerations with multi-users interactions of sensing and AI-driven devices. Methods include prototyping, speculative design, and user studies., 2. Human-AI Interaction including the development of new interaction design patterns, experimental/speculative prototypes, and theoretical investigations of AI/ML as a design material., and/or 3. Co-design, service design, and policy design applied to complex large-scale challenges, such as privacy, research security, and international collaboration. Updated October 2024.

Many HCDE PhD students are also co-advised by and work with UW faculty in HCDE or other units, through collaborations that emerge during their time in the program.