Recent Awards to AccessComputing Community Members

By Brianna Blaser, AccessComputing Director and Co-PI

Several AccessComputing community members have received awards and publicity in recent months. Please join me in congratulating these members of our community.

• AccessComputing Team member Cynthia (Cindy) Bennett received the Computing Research Association Skip Ellis Early Career Award. The Skip Ellis Award “recognizes early career individuals in academia, industry, or government research labs who exemplify the spirit of Skip Ellis through significant research contributions and outreach that broadens participation in computing.” Cindy, a graduate of UW’s Human Centered Design and Engineering PhD program and now a staff research scientist at Google, describes her research as "involving disabled people as the experts of their own lived experiences and accessible futures for everyone." Beyond her research, Cindy is a leader in accessibility and an incredible mentor.
• AccessComputing Team member Maria Fanelle, a graduate student at Tufts University and a networking and security engineer at The MITRE Corporation, was named Lime Connect’s 2025 Leadership in Disability Awardee for her leadership in framing neurodiversity as an asset.
• AccessComputing co-PI Stacy Branham (University of California Irvine), received the Alumni Impact Award Virginia Tech Center for Human Computer Interaction. Stacy, a graduate of Virginia Tech, was honored to be celebrated by her alma mater.
• The 2009 ASSETS paper “Freedom to roam: A study of mobile device adoption and accessibility for people with visual and motor disabilities”—authored by friends of AccessComputing Shaun Kane (Google), Chandrika Jayant (Be My Eyes), former co-PI Jacob Wobbrock (University of Washington), AccessComputing founding PI Richard Ladner (University of Washington)—received the 2025 ASSETS Paper Impact Award. See separate article for more information.
• AccessComputing partner Megan Hofmann (Northwestern), who has mentored AccessComputing research experience for undergraduate participants, was highlighted in the Computing Research Association’s News article Cultivating Future Computing Researchers: The Critical Role of Mentorship in CRA-WP’s NSF DREU Program.
• AccessComputing partner Wendy Ingram, founder of Dragonfly Mental Health, was profiled by UC Berkeley’s Alumni Association in the article “Action is my coping mechanism”: Wendy Marie Ingram on building community care in academia.
• AccessComputing partner Alannah Oleson (University of Denver) received an Excellence in Undergraduate Mentoring Award from the University of Denver. In addition, with their undergraduate student Muskan Fatima, they received funding from the University of Denver to work on two accessibility-related projects and together with colleagues from the University of Glasgow (Scotland) and Uppsala University (Sweden), they secured seed funding to kickstart a longitudinal, multi-institutional collaboration investigating the “not my job” fallacy among computer  students—which occurs when they believe that “someone else” will handle accessibility, ethics, and inclusion issues in their software so they don’t have t—and produce actionable strategies to support students’ ethical agency development.
• Friend of AccessComputing, Hala Annabi (University of Washington) received a $15 million grant from the Canopy Neurodiversity Foundation to establish the UW Institute for Neurodiversity and Employment, which seeks to build capacity to create meaningful employment opportunities and career experiences for neurodivergent people.