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CREATE at UW

Director Profiles

CREATE leadership comprises our Director, Director for Education, and nine associate directors.


  • Jennifer Mankoff, Director

    Jennifer Mankoff wears a blue sweater over a red shirt and sports dark brown wavy hair with grey streaks.

    CREATE Director Dr. Jennifer Mankoff's research focuses on accessibility broadly speaking. "In doing this work, I emphasize values such as intersectionality, and perspectives such as disability studies. For example, in the domain of Deaf/Hard of Hearing (DHH) technology, I am exploring how people who are multilingual engage with communication technology. Another focus of my work is…


  • Mark Harniss, Director for Education

    Mark Harniss a white man in his 50s with short brown hair and blue eyes, standing in front of fall-colored leaves.

    CREATE Associate Director, Dr. Mark Harniss' research focuses on knowledge translation, assistive technology, and accessible design. He teaches in both the Disability Studies Program and the Rehabilitation Medicine doctoral program with an emphasis on knowledge translation and disability policy. Harniss leads projects focused on developing decision aids to support people with disabilities to request reasonable…


  • Anat Caspi, Associate Director

    Anat Caspi: A white woman smiling into the camera. She is wearing a purple blouse.

    CREATE Associate Director, Dr. Anat Caspi is interested in exploring ways in which collaborative commons and cooperation can challenge and transform the current economics of assistive technology and incentivize rapid development and deployment of ethically built accessible technologies. Her research focuses on engineering machine intelligent solutions for customizable real-time, responsive technologies in the context of…


  • Heather Feldner, Associate Director

    Headshot of Heather Feldner, smiling brightly. She is a white woman with short brown and grey hair, and wears dark rimmed glasses, a gray shirt and black sweater.

    CREATE Associate Director, Dr. Heather Feldner's focus is on advancing participation and health together with people with disabilities and their families by exploring the intersections between mobility, disability, and technology in a variety of personal and environmental contexts. Her research centers on the design and implementation of mobility assistive technology, including how perceptions of disability…


  • Leah Findlater, Associate Director

    Headshot of Leah Findlater, smiling warmly. She is a white woman with brown hair and wears a turquoise sweater over a white, collared shirt.

    CREATE Associate Director, Dr. Leah Findlater is interested in how to create technologies that adapt to accommodate individual user needs and preferences, whether to improve basic interactions such as touchscreen text entry or more complex tasks such as working with machine learning models. My research goal is to ensure that the next generation of computing…


  • James Fogarty, Associate Director

    James Fogarty, a white man wearing a pink and blue plaid shirt with long, curly brown hair. He is posed with arms crossed and a warm smile.

    CREATE Associate Director, Dr. James Fogarty's broad research interests are in Human-Computer Interaction, User Interface Software and Technology, and Ubiquitous Computing. His focus is on developing, deploying, and evaluating new approaches to the human obstacles surrounding widespread everyday adoption of ubiquitous sensing and intelligent computing technologies.


  • Jon E. Froehlich, Associate Director

    Headshot of Jon Froehlich, a white man with brown hair. He is wearing a t-shirt, hoodie, and a suit coat and is smiling effusively.

    CREATE Associate Director, Dr. Jon E. Froehlich's research focuses on designing, building, and evaluating interactive technology that addresses high value social issues such as environmental sustainability, computer accessibility, and personalized health and wellness.


  • Katherine M. Steele, Associate Director

    Headshot of Katherine M. Steele, smiling warmly. She is a white woman with long brown hair.

    CREATE Associate Director, Dr. Katherine M. Steele's research focuses on using novel computational and experimental tools to understand human movement and improve treatment and quality of life of individuals with cerebral palsy, stroke, and other neurological disorders. Steele's research strives to connect engineering and medicine to create solutions that can advance our understanding of human ability, but…


  • Jacob O. Wobbrock, Associate Director

    Jacob O. Wobbrock, a 40-something white man with short hair, a beard, and glasses. He is smiling in front of a white board.

    CREATE Associate Director, Dr. Jacob O. Wobbrock's research seeks to scientifically understand people’s experiences of computers and information, and to improve those experiences through design and engineering, especially for people with disabilities. His specific research topics include input & interaction techniques, human performance measurement & modeling, HCI research & design methods, mobile computing, and accessible…