Sara Kiesler’s pioneering research helps us understand the ways technologies shape how we communicate, collaborate, trust, behave, and build community. Her early work revealed the unplanned social consequences of networked communication, underscoring how the success of technological designs depend not just on performance, but also on human factors: studying and anticipating how people perceive, trust, adapt to, and collaborate through new and evolving tools.

Kiesler’s work bridges disciplines that were once largely separate, shaping new fields including human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, social computing, and human-robot interaction. Her research has been cited in tens of thousands of published works.

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Brief career notes and awards

• From 2016 to 2026, Kiesler served as Program Manager at the National Science Foundation’s Social and Economic Sciences Division, Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate. Her responsibilities included representing social and behavioral sciences in NSF’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and other directorates’ programs, such as Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, and Smart and Connected Cyberspace. Prior to serving at the NSF, Kiesler was a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and its Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
• Kiesler is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and an elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) in the divisions of General Psychology, Social & Personality, Environment & Behavior, and in the Psychology of Women. She is a Fellow of the National Honor Society in Psychology (Psi Chi), and a Fellow of the Society for Psychological Science. She was granted the Research Scientist Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health.
• Kiesler is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and was elected to ACM’s Special Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Academy in 2002. She received SIGCHI’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.
• In 2013, the Allan Newell Award for Research Excellence was awarded to Kiesler and her research group for “elucidating the fundamental principles of human-robot interaction and its associated research methods.”
• In 2015 she received the International Communication Association’s Williams Prize; in 2016 she received the Joseph E. McGrath Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Groups from the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research (INGRoup).
• In 2018, Kiesler received HCI International’s Human Robot Interaction Lifetime Service Award, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Public Health Fellow, and a National Academy of Sciences USSR Exchange Fellow.

Selected projects

• Organization Science of Science:  With Jonathon Cummings, Kiesler studied scientific work in research groups and observed the shift to larger teams engaged in multidisciplinary and geographically-distributed research. Over a nine-year period, they followed 549 research groups funded by the National Science Foundation. The goal was to understand how the structure and interactions in these research groups led to differences in their productivity and creativity, and in their integration as teams. An example publication from this research is Group Heterogeneity Increases the Risks of Large Group Size: A Longitudinal Study of Productivity in Research Groups.
• Privacy and a New Internet Architecture:  Kiesler worked with Laura Dabbish and their students on the eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA) project to develop a new Internet architecture. One goal was to understand how a new Internet architecture would affect people’s privacy. An example publication from this research is “My Data Just Goes Everywhere:” User Mental Models of the Internet and Implications for Privacy and Security, from the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security.
• Collaborative Analysis: With Susan Fussell, Aimee Kane, and other colleagues and students, Kiesler studied intelligence analysis and how analysts and detectives collaborate. Their task was to look for clues in data, and see patterns that lead to a solution. They discovered that in remote collaborative analysis, teams believe team members’ mediocre advice online. An example publication from this research is The perverse effects of social transparency on online advice taking.
• People and Robots: This project began with Kiesler’s interest in the psychology of anthropomorphism and humanoid robots. She collaborated with Jodi Forlizzi and other colleagues and students on a large project that included designing “Snackbot,” a humanoid interactive snack-delivery robot. She served as editor of The Journal of Human-Robot Interaction (JHRI), and worked with Jessica Hodgins and Jenn Hyde on social psychological aspects of motion in animated characters and avatars. Kiesler also worked with Kevin Huang, Dan Siewiorek, and Asim Smallagic on using the iPhone to help monitor and correct at-home rehabilitation exercises. An example publication from this research is Matching Robot Appearance and Behavior to Tasks to Improve Human-Robot Cooperation.
• Online Harms: This project was conducted with colleagues at the National Science Foundation to explore the many risks associated with the evolving Internet and social media. An example publication from this research is Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program (2022): Roadmap for Researchers on Priorities Related to Information Integrity Research and Development, National Science and Technology Council, and Office of Science and Technology Policy for The White House.