Susan Dumais

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Susan T. Dumais (born August 11, 1953) is an American computer scientist known for information retrieval and human-computer interaction. She has played a major role in developing Microsoft's search technologies and in improving how people find and understand information.

Life and work
- Born in Maine, USA, and educated at Bates College and Indiana University.
- Doctoral advisor was Richard Shiffrin; one notable student is Jeff Huang.
- Early work at Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies) explored the vocabulary problem in information retrieval, showing that different people use different terms for the same concept. This led to approaches like Latent Semantic Indexing to improve search beyond exact word matching.
- Joined Microsoft Research in 1997. She is a Technical Fellow and Managing Director of the Microsoft Research Northeast Labs (including MSR New England, MSR New York, and MSR Montreal). She is also an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington Information School.

Research focus
- Gaze-enhanced interaction and how users interact with information over time.
- User modeling and personalization to tailor search results.
- New interfaces for interactive retrieval and improvements in search evaluation.

Awards and honors
- ACM Fellows (2006)
- Gerard Salton Award (2009)
- National Academy of Engineering induction (2011)
- ACM Athena Lecturer Award (2014)
- Tony Kent Strix Award (2014)
- American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2015)
- SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award (2020)
- SIGIR Academy (2021)
- Elected to the American Philosophical Society (2025)

Impact
- Dumais’s work helped transform information retrieval and human-computer interaction, influencing both theory and practical search technology, including methods that address language and vocabulary differences in searching.