Georgia Institute of Technology

Jan 21, 2021

School of Interactive Computing Associate Professor Munmun De Choudhury was named a winner of the 2021 ACM-W Rising Star Award.

The award, bestowed by the Association for Computing Machinery, recognizes a woman whose early-career research has had a significant impact on the computing discipline, as measured by factors like society impact, frequent citation of work, or creation of a new research area.

De Choudhury will receive a framed certificate and a $1,000 stipend for the recognition, which is in its first year of existence and will be given out annually. She will be recognized for the award at a research conference to be named later.

“I feel deeply honored for this recognition and owe my successes to my wonderful students and collaborators, as well as the intellectual freedom provided by Georgia Tech’s College of Computing that has helped trailblaze interdisciplinary research in computing, like mine, for years,” she said.

De Choudhury’s work leverages large-scale online social data and advances in machine learning to help answer fundamental questions relating to our social lives. Chief among them lie within the field of mental health care – understanding mental health, improving access to care, and more. Her work has been recognized by a number of other awards, including 13 best paper and honorable mention paper awards from the ACM and AAAI, as well as publications such as the New York Times, BBC, NPR, and others.

In addition to the personal appreciation, De Choudhury stressed the importance of recognizing the work of under-represented researchers in the computing field.

“I’d like to commend the efforts of ACM-W for creating this new opportunity to celebrate the research of a group under-represented in the computing field,” she said. “There is a long way to go when it comes to computing making significant positive impact on a pervasive societal problem like mental health. Still, this award serves as a valuable encouragement for the next frontier of my research program.”

De Choudhury leads the Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab. Research from the lab, both past and current, can be explored in more detail on its website.