Stacy Branham – Associate Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine.

Her research reveals how technology can isolate, offend, and harm people with disabilities, as much as it has the potential to integrate and empower them when designed properly. In a recent partnership with Toyota, she worked with blind and low vision people to co-design a wearable voice assistant for navigating airports. In another partnership with Google, she co-designed accessible profile images of people with disabilities, which now ship on all Chromebooks, marking the first time that a person who is blind can choose a representative system profile image for themself. Branham is a Co-PI of AccessComputing, a national initiative to broaden participation in computing to include people with disabilities. In 2021, she received the NSF CAREER Award and was named one of the “Brilliant 10” rising STEM researchers by Popular Science. In 2022, she was recognized by a campus-wide teaching award as a Digital Accessibility Innovator, and her alma mater, Virginia Tech Computer Science, honored her with the Distinguished Early Career Alumni Award. http://www.stacybranham.com