Dr. Elizabeth Mynatt is Professor Emeritus in the College of Computing and the former Executive Director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). IPaT is pursuing innovative new ideas to promote healthy, productive and fulfilling lives on a global scale. By fostering an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment between Georgia Tech faculty, students, and external partners, IPaT provides the continuity and capacity to address and solve today’s scientific, social, and economic grand challenges surrounding the health and wellbeing of people, their families, and communities.

In her research, Mynatt directs the Everyday Computing Lab. There she investigates the design and evaluation of health information technologies including creating personalized mobile technology for supporting breast cancer patients during their cancer journey, evaluating mobile sensing and mHealth engagement for pediatric epilepsy patients and their caregivers, and investigating the positive and negative influence of social media on self-harm behaviors such as eating disorders. She is also one of the principal researchers in the Aware Home Research Initiative; investigating the design of future home technologies, especially those that enable older adults to continue living independently as opposed to moving to an institutional care setting.

Mynatt is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of ubiquitous computing and assistive technologies. Her research contributes to ongoing work in personal health informatics, computer-supported collaborative work and human-computer interface design.

Mynatt is also the Chair of the Computing Community Consortium, an NSF-sponsored effort to engage the computing research community in envisioning more audacious research challenges. She serves as member of the National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) and as an ACM Council Member at Large. She has been recognized as an ACM Fellow, a member of the SIGCHI Academy, and a Sloan and Kavli research fellow. She has published more than 100 scientific papers and chaired the CHI 2010 conference, the premier international conference in human-computer interaction. Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 1998, Mynatt was a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC.

Her research is supported by multiple grants from NSF and NIH including Smart and Connected Health, CHS, HCC and CAREER awards. Other honorary awards include being named a Mobility Star in 2014 by the Atlanta Metro Chamber of Commerce, the Top Woman Innovator in Technology by Atlanta Woman magazine in 2005 and the 2003 College of Computing’s Dean’s Award.

Mynatt earned her Bachelor of Science summa cum laude in computer science from North Carolina State University and her Master of Science and Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia Tech.