Conference: NSF Student Travel Grant for The ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing System (CHI) 2026

This award will support 20 U.S. graduate students' registration for the Dissertation Research Roundtable at the 2026 ACM Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI has for years been the leading international forum for the presentation and discussion of research and practice related to human-computer interaction; since 1986, the conference has organized professional development opportunities for graduate students that have launched the careers of many outstanding HCI researchers. This year's event, the Dissertation Research Roundtable, is a research-focused workshop where a panel of distinguished research faculty provides research and career guidance for a group of selected promising PhD students. The event promotes rigorous intellectual exchange around dissertation-stage work, including research framing, methodological choices, ethical considerations, and theoretical integration. Structured discussion among thematically clustered students and experienced mentors fosters cross-project learning and improves the quality and impact of emerging research, including in areas such as human-artificial intelligence teaming and interaction. By prioritizing participation from students at under-resourced institutions and across a wide range of HCI subfields, the project also broadens the intellectual perspectives represented in the community and contributes to the long-term advancement of the field.

Beyond the intellectual contributions, students receive valuable opportunities to build their professional networks with each other, with the expert panel, and (through open poster sessions presenting their research) the larger community. Criteria for selection include appropriate timing in the student's career and dissertation project, the value the student will both receive and bring to the consortium, and the need for travel funding. In alignment with the consortium's overall goal to increase the range of the CHI community, the selection committee will also seek to fund students from a wide range of personal, professional, disciplinary, and institutional backgrounds. In particular, the selection committee will emphasize providing opportunities for students from institutions that have relatively few institutional and faculty resources devoted to Human-Computer Interaction, widening the range of institutions and students that participate in the field and helping to build capacity at those institutions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Award Number: 2614951
Principal Investigator: Donghee Yvette Wohn
Funds Obligated: $12,000
State: NJ