Sara Kiesler has been a pioneer in research to understand how technologies shape human communication, collaboration, trust, community, and behavior. Bridging disciplines that were once largely separate, Kiesler’s work has helped shape the interdisciplinary fields of human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, social computing, and human-robot interaction. Her research has been cited over 86,000 times.

Kiesler investigates how technological design can reshape the social dynamics of groups, organizations, and everyday life. Her early research revealed social consequences of networked communication such as changes in status relationships, online behavior, collaboration, and community formation. Many of these consequences were unplanned in early years. Her research demonstrates that successful technology design depends not only on technical performance but also on studying and anticipating how people perceive, trust, adapt to, and collaborate through new and evolving tools.

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Brief career notes and awards

• From 2016 to 2026, Kiesler served as Program Manager at the National Science Foundation, Social and Economic Sciences Division, Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate. Her responsibilities included representing social and behavioral sciences in CISE and other directorates’ programs, such as Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, and Smart and Connected Cyberspace.
• Kiesler is an elected fellow of the American Psychological Association in the divisions of General Psychology, Social & Personality, Environment & Behavior, and Psychology of Women. She is also a fellow of Psi Chi, the National Honor Society in Psychology; the Society for Psychological Science, and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She’s a Woodrow Wilson Fellow; a Public Health Fellow; a National Academy of Sciences USSR Exchange Fellow, and was granted the Research Scientist Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health.
• She was elected to the CHI Academy in 2002: a group of researchers honored by ACM’s Special Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction of the Association for Computing, and received its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.
• In 2013, Kiesler and her research group received the Allan Newell Award for Research Excellence, “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. In 2019, she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.