Recent Awards to the AccessComputing Community

In the first part of 2026, we have been lucky to see many awards go to AccessComputing leadership, partners, and student team members. Congratulations to all our friends and colleagues!

• AccessComputing Founding PI Richard Ladner was awarded the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education. The award honors the decades of work he has done to increase accessibility in CS education research and practice.
• AccessComputing co-PI Elaine Short (Tufts) was awarded the Computing Research Association’s Skip Ellis Early Career Award. The award recognizes “an early-career individual who demonstrates the potential for impactful contributions and leadership in their field of research, as well as has had a positive and significant impact on widening participation and improving access, opportunities, and positive experiences for all people in computing research and education.”
• Six AccessComputing Team Members were awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships including: Janet Jiang (UW), Ritesh Kanchi (Harvard), Gene Kim (MIT), Veronica Pimenova (University of Michigan), Ellie Seehorn (University of Michigan), and Tanisha Shende (Oberlin College). The NSF GRFP recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in STEM fields.
• Former AccessComputing Team Member Ramin Ayanzadeh (UC Boulder) recently received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his proposal on "Trustworthy Quantum Optimization."
• AccessComputing Partner Alisha Pradhan (New Jersey Institute of Technology) was a co-author with Ramprabu Thangaraj, Jed R Brubaker, Emma Dixon on Crafting Remembrance Beyond the Self: Older Adults’ Digital and Material Legacies, which received a best paper award at CHI 2026. 
• AccessComputing PI Maya Cakmak's paper "Designing Accessible Robot Communication for Blind People" with Mina Huh, Amy Pavel, and others received the Best Paper award at the 3rd Workshop on Interactive AI for Human-Centered Robotics at CHI 2026.
• AccessComputing Partner Foad Hamidi and coauthors, Krystal Zhang, Marie Sakowicz, and Emily Wingeart, received an Honorable Mention Award at CHI 2026 for the paper "Belonging in the Making: Investigating Inclusive Makerspace Design for Youth with Autism." 
• AccessComputing Partner Stephanie Ludi was an author of the paper named Most Influential Paper Award from the past 10 years "Eliciting programming challenges faced by developers with visual impairments: exploratory study,” at the 2026 Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering conference.
• AccessComputing partner Thijs Jan Roumen’s (Cornell) student Tobias Weinberg was awarded a prestigious Apple AI/ML fellowship. 
• AccessComputing partner Nicki Washington (Duke) is the recipient of the 2025 ACM Frances E. Allen Award for Outstanding Mentoring. She is “recognized for exceptional commitment to diversifying the computing community at all education levels, demonstrating creativity and breadth in her approaches.”
• AccessComputing Partner Maitraye Das received an NSF CAREER award, for a project titled “AI-Augmented Creativity Support Tools in the Nonvisual Paradigm.”
• AccessComputing Partner Jeff Bigham (Carnegie Mellon, Apple) was named to the SIGCHI Academy for his contributions to the field of human-computer interaction.