Pamela Wisniewski

Biography

Pamela Wisniewski, PhD, is a Principal Research Scientist at ICSI. She is Founder and Director of the Socio-Technical Interaction Research (STIR) Lab and Teenovate. Combining computer science, social science, and user-centered design principles, the STIR Lab leverages interdisciplinary approaches to deeply understand users, their needs, and the technologies that can be designed to best meet those needs.

An expert in the interplay between social media, privacy, and online safety for adolescents, Dr. Wisniewski’s work lies at the intersection of social computing and privacy. She has authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications and won multiple best papers (top 1%) and best paper honorable mentions (top 5%) at ACM SIGCHI conferences. She has been awarded $6.04 million in external grant funding, including the NSF CAREER Award. Her research has been featured by popular news media outlets, including Scientific American, CNN, ABC News, NPR, Psychology Today, and U.S. News and World Report. She is an ACM Senior Member and was previously a Computing Research Association (CRA) CCC Council Member. She was also the first ever computer scientist to be selected as a William T. Grant Scholar for her work on reducing digital inequality in youth outcomes. The importance of her work on adolescent online safety has been recognized nationally and internationally by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the Netherlands’ Down to Zero Alliance on combating the online sexual exploitation of children, and the White House’s Force on Kids Online Health and Safety.

Previously, Dr. Wisniewski served as Associate Professor & Flowers Family Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University, Associate Professor & Associate Chair for Information Technology at the University of Central Florida, and Postdoctoral Fellow at The Pennsylvania State University. She earned her PhD in Computing and Information Systems from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and her Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Decision & Information Science from the University of Florida.

Publications

Selected Honors & Awards

• NSF CAREER Award, 2019
• UCF Reach for the Stars Award, 2019
• William T. Grant Early Career Scholars Award, 2018
• Inaugural Member of ACM’s Future Computing Academy, 2017
• McKnight Faculty Fellow, 2017-2018
• Best Paper Awards: CHI 2019, VRST 2018, SUI 2018, CHI 2016, CHI 2015
• Best Paper Honorable Mentions: CSCW 2015, CHI 2014

Areas of Expertise

• AI Ethics, Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
• AI for Humanitarian Aid, Disaster Response, and Social Good
• Security and Privacy
• Usable Security and Privacy by Design
• Human-Centered Computing
• Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design
• User Experience (UX), Usability, and Interface Design
• Accessibility, Inclusive Design, and Assistive Technologies
• Collaborative Systems, Social Computing, and CSCW
• Human-AI Interaction and Trust in AI Systems
• Wearable Computing, Ubiquitous, and Pervasive Systems
• Digital Wellbeing, Behavior-Aware Computing, and Ethical Design
• Social Media Platforms, Online Communities, and Digital Culture
• Extended Reality (XR): AR, VR, and Immersive Environments
• Computing, Science, and Society
• AI Ethics, Responsible AI, and Governance of Technology
• Technology Policy, Standards, and Global Governance
• Digital Education, EdTech, and Computational Thinking
• Societal Impacts of AI, Automation, and Robotics
• Digital Humanities, Computational Social Science, and Cultural Analytics
• Technology for Social Good: Climate, Equity, Disaster Response
• Global Digital Inclusion, Access, and Equity

ICSI Activity