24 September 2007

Vicki Hanson appointed Leverhulme visiting professor at Dundee

Vicki Hanson, one of the world’s leading researchers on computing technologies for older and disabled people, has been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Trust grant to become a Visiting Professor at the University of Dundee.

Professor Hanson, who is manager of Accessibility Research at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York, joins a well established research group in the School of Computing at Dundee.

"I have been working for more than 30 years on ways to improve the lives of people with disabilities through the use of computer technology. Among research centres in this area, the School of Computing at the University of Dundee stands out as a world leader," said Professor Hanson.

"Researchers in Dundee have been instrumental in defining this field of study and have created novel research methods and new technologies to assist older adults and numerous people with disabilities. As such, the chance to work with this group is an extraordinary opportunity for me."

Professor Hanson’s background is in Cognitive Psychology, and she has been particularly interested in exploring how deaf children learn to read and become proficient in their native sign language. She has conducted research on American Sign Language (ASL), looking at how early exposure to ASL fosters improved reading skill, and building computer-based training systems that allow English and ASL to be used together to promote reading success.

More recently, she has been looking at issues of universal access to the World Wide Web, in particular looking at how the Web can be made more usable for older adults and others with visual, motor, and cognitive disabilities.

Professor Hanson is Chair of an international organization of professionals working on research and development of computing and information technology to help people with disabilities - the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing (www.acm.org/sigaccess/).

Looking ahead to her new role at Dundee, she said, "At the university I will explore new approaches to improving computer technology to make it more useful and usable for older adults, especially older members of the workforce."

"Population demographics indicate that in coming years older adults will comprise larger and larger segments of the working population. Governments and industry are currently scrambling to prepare for this major change. As part of this visiting professorship, I will also be visiting a number of universities in the UK and I look forward to exchanging ideas about how technology can be applied to address this issue."

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