Wendy Mackay

Mackay received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from University of California, San Diego in 1977. She received a Master of Science in Experimental Psychology from Northeastern University in 1979 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990.[2][9] Her doctoral research was supervised by Wanda Orlikowski.

After graduating from MIT, Mackay formed a multimedia research grop at Digital Equipment Corporation. There, she created over 30 multimedia projects, including the first interactive video system which was titled IVIS. She then continued to manage research groups at MIT and eventually worked as a senior research scientist at Xerox PARC where she published an award-winning special issue of Communications of the ACM on computer augmented environments.[10] She also worked on augmented paper interfaces and explored the integration of paper with the online world.[11] Afterward, she taught at University of Aarhus, University of Paris-Sud, and Stanford University as a visiting professor.

Her scientific contributions include writing the original toolkit software for IVIS, the world's first interactive video system. She also conducted the first major study of electronic mail while at MIT.[12] Her design methods are taught in institutions around the world such as Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, and University of British Columbia. Mackay has published over two hundred research articles on human-computer interaction and has served as program chair or on the program committees of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), ACM Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), ACM DIS and ACM Multimedia.

Wendy married Michel Beaudouin-Lafon on August 11, 1993 in Avalon, California. She has two sons - Alexandre and Matthew Thomas Beaudouin-Mackay.[19]