Leah Findlater


Leah K. Findlater is a Canadian and American computer scientist specializing in human-computer interaction, mobile computing, computer accessibility. She is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington.

Education and career

Findlater studied computer science at the University of Regina, graduating with high honors in 2001. She went to the University of British Columbia for graduate study, becoming a participant there in Maria Klawe's project on aphasia. She earned a master's degree at UBC in 2004, with the thesis Comparing Static, Adaptable, and Adaptive Menus, and completed her Ph.D. in 2009 with the dissertation Supporting Feature Awareness and Improving Performance with Personalized Graphical User Interfaces, both under the supervision of Joanna McGrenere.
After postdoctoral research at the University of Washington with Professor Jacob O. Wobbrock, she joined the computer science faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park before returning to Washington as a faculty member in 2017.

Contributions

Findlater's research has included work on a voice-based software assistant to help blind people navigate the internet, and an augmented reality system to provide real-time captioning for hard-of-hearing people.