Dianne Murray

Dianne Murray has a joint degree in Computer Science and Psychology and has been involved in the Human Computer Interaction field since 1979, when she met MICKIE, the Medical Interviewing Computer (later to be exhibited at the Science Museum, Londn) in a doctor's surgery. Her first career was as a research scientist in a renowned UK government research laboratory. Her second career was as a university lecturer in the London area and her third as a Senior Research Fellow in a multidisciplinary research group in a 5*-rated University department. She has extensive experience of teaching Human Computer Interaction at both undergraduate and postgraduate level in a number of prestigious institutions and, since 1997, has been responsible for the HCI component of a University of London External Degree Programme, re-writing and updating the Study Guide some three times over the years. Her fourth career as a Usability and HCI consultant and her fifth as an academic journal editor have taken place in parallel.

She has been continually involved in writing, researching and editing - academic papers, textbooks, technical reports and general audience articles on her specialist research subjects. She has extensive experience of acting as an editor for collected books of readings and conference publications and of producing material associated with specialist conferences. Her earliest experience was in producing computer-based training material and writing technical manuals for the MICROTEXT system (Acorn Publications, 1985). More recently she has produced reports and deliverables on technical matters for European Community-funded research projects, and gained much experience in managing, writing and submitting proposals for research funding, and acting as an expert Evaluator and Technical Rapporteur for the European Framework programmes of research.

A founder member of interaction (originally the British HCI Group), she was the first Editor of its Newsletter (later the magazine, Interfaces) and has been General Editor of the international and interdisciplinary journal, Interacting with Computers, published by Elsevier Science, for 11 years, being Deputy Editor and co-founder for 10 years prior to that.

Since the birth of her twin sons she has worked both as a part-time HCI and Usability consultant and as sub-contractor to her partner, Neil Sandford, at Putting People Before Computers. Now that her youngest children are at secondary school she intends to pursue her original research into adaptive interfaces and intelligent systems and to restart her interrupted doctorate in Human Computer Interaction.