The recipient of the 2025 Bill Buxton Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, which is awarded to an outstanding doctoral dissertation completed at a Canadian university in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, is Dr. Blue (Georgianna) Lin.
Dr. Lin’s doctoral dissertation on Multimodal Tracking with Ubiquitous Devices to Foster Holistic Menstrual Health Sensemaking, makes significant contributions to human-computer interaction by advancing the design of technologies that support women in understanding complex, longitudinal personal health data. Her work addresses a critically underserved area in HCI, and demonstrates how multimodal sensing technologies can enable more holistic and personalized health sensemaking. A key strength of Dr. Lin’s dissertation is its methodological rigor and scope. Across multiple studies, including longitudinal deployments, she combined qualitative and quantitative approaches to generate deeply grounded design insights. Her work also carefully incorporates diverse participant perspectives across ages and demographics, strengthening the generalizability and impact of her findings.
Beyond empirical contributions, Dr. Lin advances conceptual understanding in HCI by articulating design requirements and frameworks that support users’ evolving sensemaking processes. Her research highlights how current personal informatics tools often reinforce narrow views of health, and she demonstrates how systems can instead support richer, more integrated understandings that better align with users’ lived experiences and needs. The committee also recognizes the broader significance of this work in addressing issues of equity and representation in technology design. By focusing on menstrual health, an area historically overlooked in computing, Dr. Lin’s research contributes to reducing stigma and expanding access to meaningful, user-centred health technologies.
Dr. Lin is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work spans human-computer interaction, machine learning, and health informatics. She recently completed her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Dr. Alex Mariakakis and Dr. Khai Truong, and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 2019 and 2020, both in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on designing systems that help people interpret and act on complex multimodal data, particularly in the context of personal health. She has received several competitive awards, including a Google PhD Fellowship, Georgia Tech GVU Distinguished Masters Student Award, and multiple University of Toronto research recognitions. Her work has been published in leading venues such as ACM CHI, ACM IMWUT, npj Digital Medicine, and ACM Transactions on Healthcare.
The Bill Buxton Award was established in 2011 in honour of Canadian researcher, designer, and musician William (Bill) Buxton, O.C. The award, which was founded with support from an anonymous donor, recognizes emerging researchers who — like Bill — seek to do deep, insightful, and rigorous work that challenges how academics and practitioners think, and inspires them to do things differently.
The award is determined through a juried process by a selection committee consisting of accomplished researchers in Human-Computer Interaction, organized this year by Dr. Celine Latulipe (University of Manitoba). The 2026 jury consisted of Dr. Pourang Irani (University of British Columbia – Okanagan), Dr. Miguel Nacenta (University of Victoria), Dr. Stacey Scott (University of Guelph), and Dr. Wesley Willett (University of Calgary).
