Dr. Sara Kiesler is the Hillman Professor Emerita of Computer Science and Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Kiesler is an influential, innovative scholar whose publications have been cited over 50,000 times. View her Google Scholar profile.

Since August 2016, Dr. Kiesler has served as Program Manager at the National Science Foundation, Social and Economic Sciences Division, Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate. &CC), RIDIR, and BIGDATA.

Kiesler applies behavioral and social science methods and theory to technology design, especially to understanding how technologies challenge existing behavior patterns of individuals, groups, and organizations. She conducted among the first scientific studies of computer-mediated communication and early forms of the Internet.

With Lee Sproull, Kiesler authored the seminal book, Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization (MIT Press). In the early to mid-1990s, as the general public began to use the Internet, she was a founding researcher of the HomeNet project, which studied how families used the Internet. She has collaborated extensively within Carnegie Mellon and with other university colleagues on social design of the Internet, and has been working on the privacy and security challenges for a future Internet architecture.

Kiesler has studied technology in work settings and was among those who pointed out opportunities and problems associated with multidisciplinary and complex forms of collaboration, geographically dispersed science and project work (see Distributed Work with Pamela Hinds, MIT Press), information sharing, and the design of human-robot interaction.

Kiesler is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, Psi Chi, the Society for Psychological Science, and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She was elected to the CHI Academy in 2002, a group of researchers honored by ACM’s Special Interest Group in Computer–Human Interaction of the Association for Computing, and received its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. Her research group received the Allan Newell Award for Research Excellence in 2013 for “elucidating the fundamental principles of human-robot interaction and its associated research methods.” In 2015 received the International Communication Association Williams Prize. In 2016 she received the Joseph E. McGrath Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Groups from the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research (INGRoup).