ACM-W Rising Star Award Recipient: Munmun De Choudhury
ACM-W would like to announce Dr. Munmun De Choudhury as this year’s recipient of the ACM-W Rising Star Award. The ACM-W Rising Star Award recognizes a woman whose early-career research has had a significant impact on the computing discipline. Dr. De Choudhury will receive a framed certificate and $1,000 stipend. ACM-W would like to thank Dr. Andrea Goldsmith for her donation, which was used to establish this award.
Munmun De Choudhury, PhD is an Associate Professor at the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech. Dr. De Choudhury’s research develops novel computational techniques, and technologies powered by these techniques, to responsibly and ethically employ social media in quantifying, understanding, and improving personal and societal health and well-being. She is credited to have laid the foundation of this new line of research – a topic that now constitutes a full-fledged research pursuit among scholars and practitioners worldwide. Towards this goal, Dr. De Choudhury’s research program adopts a highly interdisciplinary and collaborative approach involving over 150 coauthors from more than 10 disciplines, that balances methodological contributions with practical impact. Her research group at Georgia Tech – the Social Dynamics and Well-Being Laboratory, combines the power of social computing, machine learning, and natural language analysis with insights and theories from the social and behavioral sciences, such as psychology, sociology, psychiatry, medicine, and public health. Dr. De Choudhury evaluates the developed computational techniques using diverse, trans-disciplinary human-centered methods, deriving conclusions grounded in human behavior.
Dr. De Choudhury’s work has been the recipient of many awards, including 13 best paper and honorable mention paper awards from the ACM and AAAI, the 2019 Complex Systems Junior Scientific Award, and faculty awards from Mozilla, Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo!. Her research has raised over $14 million in research grants, gifts, and contracts from federal, industry, and non-profit sponsors, demonstrating the breadth of her research impact and interest from diverse stakeholders. Dr. De Choudhury’s research has also been extensively covered by prominent popular press like the New York Times, BBC, NPR, NBC News, Wired, Atlantic, Scientific American, and the Time magazine. She has advised social media companies, non-profits, advocacy and governmental organizations, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, The Aspen Institute, The Civic Signals Initiative, Everytown for Gun Safety, The United Nations Foundation, The Pacific Northwest National Lab, The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. In 2020, Dr. De Choudhury served as the General Chair of International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), the leading interdisciplinary conference on social media. Earlier, Dr. De Choudhury was a faculty associate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, and obtained her PhD in Computer Science from Arizona State University in 2011.
The ACM-W Chair Dr. Jodi Tims will be presenting the award (pending logistics) to Dr. De Choudhury at a conference of her choice. We would like to congratulate Dr. De Choudhury on her early career success and contributions to the field of computing!
Sincerely,
The ACM-W Rising Star Selection Committee
Pamela Wisniewski (Chair), Samaher Al-Janabi, Lilia Georgieva, Heli Helskyaho, Bimlesh Wadhwa, and Tao Xie