I am excited to join the HCI/d faculty and serve as director for the HCI/d MS program and PhD Track! I just started in August 2023, but have a long history in HCI education and scholarship and have previously been a student at IU. I completed my PhD at IU in Education in the early 2010s and got to know many cohorts of students during my time as an HCI/d minor from 2010-2014. I spent the last eight years building world-class HCI program experiences at Purdue University and am thrilled to move back to IU and bring a range of innovative and empirically-studied program concepts to Luddy. My husband, Dr. Austin Toombs (HCI/d MS 2012 and PhD 2016 alumnus) has also joined the HCI/d program this year to round out a truly fantastic group of core faculty.
As one of our alumni, you know that IU HCI/d has a long history since its inception in the early 2000s. As a group, you work in UX, strategy, and director roles at companies around the world—many in leadership and management positions. My goal in joining the program as director is to honor this tradition of excellence, but also embark on a timely evolution of one of the world’s leading HCI programs as we enter our third decade as a program. This is an exciting time to do impactful work in HCI, and my goal is for our students to enter the workforce prepared for the immediate challenges the industry is facing, but also to have knowledge and skills that help our alumni to remain relevant many decades into the future. We have some exciting program changes in store which we hope to share with you soon.
If you want to engage more closely with the program as a mentor, guest speaker, or in another role, I welcome you to reach out! For our students and program offerings to be successful, we need your guidance and support. I am always open to having a conversation about our future program direction and will share our program evolution as transparently as I can. Feel free to use our program email which I manage: hcid@iu.edu