Jon Honored with the 2026 SIGCHI Societal Impact Award

I am deeply honored to receive the ACM SIGCHI Societal Impact Award this year. This is a shared milestone—one that belongs to Makeability Lab students and collaborators who share our vision for HCI + social impact spaces such as accessibility, health & wellness, environmental sustainability, and STEM education. At CHI'26 in Barcelona, I gave a reflective talk on lessons learned, failures, successes, resilience—and the people who supported and influenced me along the way. Thanks to my student Jared Hwang for recording the video with his iPhone (slides are here).

I want to acknowledge and thank my MS advisor, Professor Paul Dourish, and my PhD co-advisors, Professors James Landay and Shwetak Patel, as well as my PhD internship mentors—Mike Chen, Ian Smith, & Sunny Consolvo at Intel Research, John Krumm at Microsoft Research, and Nuria Oliver, PhD at Telefonica—for guiding me at earlier stages of my career. Special shout out, as well, to Professor Jacob O. Wobbrock who provided my first accessibility research experience in 2006 (I have a story about this in my talk!).

As a professor, my biggest impact is my students. I have had the incredible privilege of advising 13 PhD students and one long-time research scientist: Arnavi Chheda, Kotaro Hara, Liang He, Jared Hwang, Dhruv “DJ” Jain, Seokbin Kang, Jae (Jaewook) Lee, Chu Li, Matthew Louis Mauriello, Manaswi Saha, Ph.D., Michael Saugstad, Lee Stearns, Xia Su, and Daniel Campos Zamora. These PhD students have helped mentor and advise an additional 162 undergrads and 31 high school students in the Makeability Lab.

Here's a picture of a small contingent of these students helping me celebrate at CHI'26 in Barcelona following my talk.

It has been so fulfilling watching these students—across all levels—achieve great things.

Finally, thanks to the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering for putting together this news story with more details.