Tawanna Dillahunt

Tawanna Dillahunt was born in North Carolina and received her B.S. in Computer Engineering Magna Cum Laude at North Carolina State University in 2000. She received her MS from the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology in 2005. She received an MS from Carnegie Mellon University in 2011 and her PhD from there in 2012. She joined the School of Information faculty at the University of Michigan in 2013.

Dillahunt has made foundational contributions in the areas of human-computer interaction, pervasive and ubiquitous computing, and computer supported collaborative work and social computing. She has received numerous awards from top computing venues including Best Papers awards and Honorable Mentions from SIGCHI, DIS, and Ubicomp, and the Inaugural Skip Ellis Early Career Award from the Computing Research Association.[3] She is the recipient of prestigious fellowships including the Fran Allen IBM PhD Fellowship, the Richard Tapia Scholarship, and the IBM PhD Fellowship. She is a Kavli Fellow[4] with the National Academy of Sciences.

She is best known for her work designing and evaluating technologies related to unemployment, environmental sustainability, and technical literacy. She has received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation to support her work.[5][6][7][8] Most recently, she received a grant to study transportation barriers in underserved urban and rural communities in Michigan.[9]

She is regularly sought as an expert speaker and advisor. She has given lectures internationally, including at Microsoft Research Bangalore, Detroit Employment Solutions Corporation, Stanford University, and Northwestern University.[10][11] She is a board member or advisor at Our House, Michigan Works!, University of Michigan Digital Inclusion Policy Fellowship, and University of Michigan Poverty Solutions.[12]

• Froehlich, J., Dillahunt, T., Klasnja, P., Mankoff, J., Consolvo, S., Harrison, B., & Landay, J. A. (2009, April). UbiGreen: investigating a mobile tool for tracking and supporting green transportation habits. In Proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1043–1052).
• Dillahunt, T. R., & Malone, A. R. (2015, April). The promise of the sharing economy among disadvantaged communities. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2285–2294).
• Dillahunt, T. R. (2014, April). Fostering social capital in economically distressed communities. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 531–540).
• Dillahunt, T., Wang, Z., & Teasley, S. D. (2014). Democratizing higher education: Exploring MOOC use among those who cannot afford a formal education. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 15(5), 177–196.