Congratulations to long-time Makeability Lab collaborator and HCDE PhD student, Emma McDonnell, on successfully defending her PhD disseration entitled "Understanding, Designing, and Theorizing Collective Access Approaches to Captioning-Mediated Communication." Emma's disseration contributes a new theoretical framework oriented around notions of collective access, which she explored and reified via both formative and design-oriented studies. It was an honor to sit on Emma's PhD dissertation committee along with Professors Leah Findlater (advisor and chair), Daniela Rosner, and Mark Harness.

I have had the distinct pleasure of working closely with Emma throughout her graduate career from co-authoring six papers together to collaborating on ACM ASSETS'22 (where I was General Chair and Emma served on the sub-committee to plan and execute the first-ever hybrid ASSETS conference).

Emma is a deep thinker, a bridger of disciplines—particularly technology design and disability studies—and a gifted mentor and community builder. 

Congrats Emma on a well-deserved pass!