Emma J. McDonnell

About Me

I'm a 5th and final year PhD candidate in Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington. This year (AY 23/24) I'm on the job market, looking for tenure track faculty positions, ideally in interdisciplinary programs or Information Schools. I do accessibility research, blending my computer science, design, and disability studies backgrounds to explore ways that technology can be designed to align with disability politics and social worlds. My dissertation research explores how communication technology, specifically captioning, could be redesigned to encourage mixed ability groups to take a collective approach to accessibility.

ejm249 [at] uw [dot] edu

Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

Last updated: October 2023

Selected Publications

• Emma J. McDonnell, Tessa Eagle, Pitch Sinlapanuntakul, Soo Hyun (Andy) Moon, Jon E. Froehlich, Kate Ringland, and Leah Findlater. 2024. "Caption it in an Accessible Way That Is Also Enjoyable": Characterizing User-Driven Captioning Practices on TikTok. Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
• Emma J. McDonnell, Soo Hyun (Andy) Moon, Lucy Jiang, Steven M. Goodman, Raja Kushalnagar, Jon E. Froehlich, and Leah Findlater. 2023. "Easier or Harder, Depending on Who the Hearing Person Is": Codesigning Videoconferencing Tools for Small Groups with Mixed Hearing Status". In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23), April 23-28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages.
• View our recorded presentation of this work
• ~Best Paper Nominee~ Emma McDonnell*, Kelly Avery Mack*, Leah Findlater, and Heather Evans. 2022. Chronically Under-Addressed: Considerations for HCI Accessibility Practice with Chronically Ill People In The 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’22), October 23–26, 2022, Athens, Greece. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages.
• View our recorded presentation of this work
• ~Honorable Mention~ Kelly Avery Mack, Emma J. McDonnell, Venkatesh Potluri, Maggie Xu, Jailyn Zabala, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Jennifer Mankoff, and Cynthia L. Bennett. 2022. Anticipate and Adjust: Cultivating Access in Human-Centered Methods. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22). ACM, New York, NY, USA.
• View our recorded presentation of this work
• Jazz Rui Xia Ang*, Ping Liu*, Emma J. McDonnell, and Sarah Coppola. 2022. “Can you see me? Are you talking to me?”: Exploring Inclusive Video Conference Design for Signers. Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
  • View our recorded presentation of this work
• ~Honorable Mention and Recognition for Diversity and Inclusion~ Emma J. McDonnell, Ping Liu, Steven M. Goodman, Raja Kushalnagar, Jon E. Froehlich, and Leah Findlater. 2021. Social, Environmental, and Technical: Factors at Play in the Current Use and Future Design of Small-Group Captioning. In PACM on Human Computer Interaction, Vol. 5, CSCW2, Article 434, October 2021. ACM, New York, NY, USA. 25 pages.
  • View our recorded presentation of this work
• Steven M. Goodman, Ping Liu, Dhruv Jain, Emma J. McDonnell, Jon E. Froehlich, and Leah Findlater. 2021. Toward User-Driven Sound Recognizer Personalization With People Who Are d/Deaf or Hard of Hearing. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 5, 2, Article 63 (June 2021), 23 pages.
• ~Honorable Mention~ Kelly Avery Mack, Emma J. McDonnell, Dhruv Jain, Lucy Lu Wang, Jon E. Froehlich, and Leah Findlater. 2021. What Do We Mean by "Accessibility Research"?: A Literature Survey of Accessibility Papers in CHI and ASSETS from 1994 to 2019. Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA.
• View our recorded presentation of this work
• Lucy Lu Wang, Kelly Avery Mack, Emma J. McDonnell, Dhruv Jain, Leah Findlater, and Jon E. Froehlich. 2021. A bibliometric analysis of citation diversity in accessibility and HCI research. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’21 Extended Abstracts), May 8–13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11 pages.

Teaching Experience

Honors/Awards

• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow; 2021-2026
• University of Washington Disability Studies Dennis Lang Award Winner; 2023
• Selected to participate in the ASSETS 2022 Doctoral Consortium
• Northwestern Gender Studies George C. Casey Prize; 2019
• Northwestern Engineering Murphy Scholar; 2015-2019

Mentoring/Advising

• Adrian Rodriguez, PhD Human Centered Design and Engineering, 2022-Present
• Weerachet (Pitch) Sinlapanuntakal, PhD Human Centered Design and Engineering, 2023-Present
• Ana Liu, M.S. Human Centered Design and Engineering, 2019-Present
• Andy Moon, M.S. Human Centered Design and Engineering, 2020-Present
• Jazz Ang, M.S. Human Centered Design and Engineering 2021-Present
• Lucy Jiang, B.S. Computer Science and Engineering, 2021-Present

Volunteer/Service

ASSETS 2022 Virtual Co-Chair; November 2021-October 2022

• Member of the ASSETS 2022 Organizing Committee, responsible for planning and executing the virtual aspect of this year’s hybrid conference

UAW #4121 Contract Enforcement; January 2021-Present

• Member of UAW #4121 Union Contract Enforcement, responsible for supporting union members who suspect that they have been harmed by a contract violation in investigating what has happened and finding resolution, including through a formal grievance process

HCDE PhD Student Research Grant Reviewer; April 2022-Present

• Providing feedback on and making decisions about PhD student applications for departmental grants, allocating $6000 of funding annually

PhD Student Ambassador; October 2021-Present

• Serving as a contact for prospective HCDE PhD students, meeting 1:1 and facilitating information sessions

PhD Application Review; December 2020-Present

• Annually review applications for the HCDE PhD program

Girls Who Code Facilitator; September 2021-June 2022

• Supporting high school girls in learning Python and gaining familiarity with computer science

Admitted PhD Student Days Coordinator; March 2019-Present

• Organized and ran activities to introduce students admitted to the HCDE PhD program to the department and Seattle, both in person and online

Selected Invited Talks/Panels

Advanced Topics in Accessibiltiy, University of Michigan; September 2023

• Invited by Dr. Dhruv Jain to facilitate a discussion of disability history and its relevance to computing

CSE-P 590 - The Future of Accessible Technology; University of Washington ; February 2023

• Invited by Dr. Jennifer Mankoff to present with Kelly Avery Mack on our ASSETS 2022 paper, "Chronically Under-Addressed: Consideraitons for HCI Accessibility Practice with Chronically Ill People"

CSCI 327 - Inclusive Technology Design, Oberlin College ; February 2023

• Invited by Dr. Emily Wang to facilitate a discussion of disability history and its relevance to computing

AccessComputing Webinar - Considerations for Technology Design For People with Chronic Illnesses; January 2023

• Co-presented findings from our 2022 ASSETS paper on chronic illness and technology with Kelly Avery Mack, and participated on a panel discussion about this topic

Access Lunch, Carnegie Mellon University; December 2023

• I was invited to present on my ongoing dissertation work, "Toward Collective Access in Captioning Design"

UW Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering Accessibility Colloquium; November 2022

• Co-presented "Chronically Under-Addressed: Considerations for HCI Accessibilty Practice with Chronically Ill People" with Kelly Mack

Accessibility, HCI, and Aging Group, University of Michigan; April 2022, October 2022, January 2023

• I was invited as a guest speaker on my ongoing dissertation work, "Toward Collective Access in Captioning Design"

HCDE 515 and 315 - Accessiblity and Inclusive Design, University of Washington; April 2022, October 2022, January 2023

• Invited by Dr. Sarah Coppola to guest lecture on Disability Studies and its relevance to HCI and design practice

Society for Disability Studies 2021 Conference; April 2021

• Devva Kasnitz, Jen Mankoff, Meryl Alper, Emma McDonnell, Kelly Avery Mack, and Venkatesh Potluri. April 18, 2021. Human Computer Interaction Folk Have Found Disability Studies: Playing Together Well! Society for Disability Studies @ Ohio State University Conference 2021

HCI 05499 - Special Topics in HCI: Accessibility, Carnegie Mellon University; March 2021

• Invited by Dr. Patrick Carrington to present my work "Social, Environmental and Technical: Factors at Play in the Current Use and Future Design of Small-Group Captioning