“…There's nothing like a gathering of scholars to break up old thinking patterns. Thanks for the wonderful push toward new directions!” – Lorna Boschmna, Simon Fraser University, Canada

The ACM CHI Doctoral Consortium is a 2-day symposium that provides an opportunity for doctoral students like GRAND's Lorna Boschman to explore and develop their research interests in an interdisciplinary workshop, under the guidance of a panel of distinguished researchers. 

This year's symposium held May 7-8, involved 16 international doctoral students, selected from 48 submissions, reviewed by four international faculty panellists, plus symposium co-chairs Saul Greenberg (University of Calgary) and Mary Beth Rosson (Penn State University). For two days the students, panellists and co-chairs participated in intense presentations and discussions, and mingled during social events that helped pull them together as an academic peer group.

Here's what a few other students had to say about their experience: 

"The participation in the doctoral consortium was a fantastic experience. The panelists and students asked critical, challenging, and inspiring questions about my research. Furthermore, we had the chance to discuss common problems we all are facing during our PhD research. Overall, I had the opportunity to meet an amazing group of fellow researchers and learn more about their research. I look forward to meeting many of them again at upcoming conferences."
- Nicolai Marquardt, University of Calgary Canada

"Valuable comments from the chairs, faculty and my fellow students helped me to think about future directions and ways to improve the framing of my work. I also found it very encouraging to hear how other students had tackled challenges in their own work. I left feeling motivated … with lots of new ideas about how I can further develop my research.”
- Katy Howland, University of Sussex, UK

“It was a stimulating intellectual experience to see both the diversity of topics and commonality of problems among my peers' dissertation work. It helped me reflect not only about how to improve my work but also how to advise my future students."
- Hao-Chuan Wang, Cornell, USA

“I received valuable feedback, not only from the panelists but also from the other students. … there were so many new and interesting ideas that I could fill three dissertations. Also, the diversity of backgrounds of the presenters gave us the chance to see other approaches to HCI and research in general.”
– Dominikus Baur, University of Munich, LMU, Germany

Sponsored by GRAND NCE, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the ACM CHI doctoral consortium, is one of several programs affiliated with the annual CHI conference, the premier international conference of human-computer interaction.