Susan Dumais is a Technical Fellow and Director of the Microsoft Research Labs in New England, New York City and Montréal QC, and an adjunct professor at the University of Washington. Prior to joining Microsoft, she was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs. Her research is at the intersection of human-computer interaction, information retrieval, and ML/AI.  A common theme that runs through her work is the importance of understanding and improving information systems from an interdisciplinary and user-centered perspective. She is a co-inventor of Latent Semantic Analysis, a well-known word embedding technique, which was designed to mitigate the disagreement between the words that authors use in creating content and those that searchers use to find information. Her research spans a wide range of topics in information systems, including email spam filtering, user modeling and personalization, context-aware information systems, temporal dynamics of information, and large-scale behavioral interactions. Her work has shaped several widely used Microsoft products and services including Bing, Windows search, Outlook, SharePoint, and Office Help), and she has published widely in the fields of information retrieval, human-computer interaction, and AI.

Susan is an ACM Fellow, was elected to the CHI Academy, the SIGIR Academy, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). She received the ACM Athena Lecturer Award for fundamental contributions to computer science, the ACM SIGIR Gerard Salton Award for lifetime achievement in information retrieval, the Tony Kent Strix Award for outstanding contributions to information retrieval, the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award for lifetime achievement in human-computer interaction, and the lifetime achievement Award from Indiana University Department of Psychological and Brain Science.