University of Dundee (Scotland)
Throughout her career, Dr. Vicki Hanson has worked in fields related to people with disabilities. From 1978 to 1986, she conducted research in the areas of American Sign Language (ASL) and reading, first as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
Dr. Hanson joined the IBM Research Division in 1986 where she founded and managed the Accessibility Research group. Her primary research areas are human-computer interaction, aging, and learning and cognitive disabilities, and applications she has created have received multiple awards from organizations representing older and disabled users. She is Chair of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing (SIGACCESS). In addition, she is the founder and co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing. Through an Award from the Leverhulme Trust to the University of Dundee, she served as a Visiting Professor at the university during 2007–08.
A Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS CITP), Dr. Hanson was named ACM Fellow in 2004 for contributions to computing technologies for people with disabilities. In 2008, she received the ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award for the application of HCI research to pressing social needs. She received a B.A. from the University of Colorado and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Oregon.
