Elizabeth Churchill

Elizabeth Churchill is Director of User Experience at Google. Her field of study is Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience. She currently focuses on the design of effective designer and developer tools for Material Design, Google’s design system.

Elizabeth earned her BSc in Experimental Psychology and her MSc in Knowledge Based Systems from Sussex. She undertook a PhD in Cognitive Science at Cambridge and continued her research at the University of Nottingham before moving into industry in 1997.  

She has led research in a number of well-known companies, including eBay, Yahoo!, Palo Alto Research Center and FX Palo Alto Laboratory – Fuji Xerox’s research lab. Working across a number of research areas, she has published research and taught courses at a number of universities.

She has more than 50 patents granted or pending, seven academic books, and over 100 publications in theoretical and applied psychology, cognitive science, human-computer interaction, mobile/ubiquitous computing, computer-mediated communication and social media.

In 2016, she received the Citris-Banatao Institute Athena Award for Executive Leadership. The current Secretary/Treasurer of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), she served on the Executive Committee of the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SigCHI), for eight years – six of those as Executive Vice President and two as Vice President for Chapters.

She has also undertaken leadership committee, scientist and speaker roles at a number of associated conferences.

Read an interview with Elizabeth here.

See who else is receiving an honorary degree from Sussex in summer 2018.