Dr. Narges Mahyar
Senior Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, City St George’s University of London
Brief Bio
Narges Mahyar is a senior lecturer at City St George’s, University of London. Before joining City, she was an Associate Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Radcliffe Fellow for 2024-2025 at Harvard University. Narges’s research intersects Human-Computer Interaction, Information Visualization, Social Computing, and Design. She designs, develops, and evaluates novel social computing and visualization techniques that help people explore, understand, and make data-informed decisions. Over the past decade, she has focused on the emerging interdisciplinary area of “Digital Civics,” which explores new strategies for scaling and diversifying public engagement in massive decision-making processes related to civic issues such as sustainable urban design and climate change mitigation. Her research has received many accolades, including nine Best Paper Awards/Best Paper Honorable Mentions Awards at top venues such as CHI, Eurovis, CSCW, VAST, DIS, and TiiS.
Beyond her community-centered research, Narges is deeply committed to mentoring and supporting women and underrepresented minorities in computing. She has created a “mentoring program” involving more than 60 undergraduate students in research, over half women, and has actively volunteered with organizations such as Women in Computer Science and Girls Learning Code.
Ambitions for the London ACM-W Chapter
Her ambition for the London ACM-W Chapter is to cultivate a space where research, creativity, and community intersect to empower women and other minorities in computing. Drawing from her work in community-centred computing, she is particularly eager to foster initiatives that highlight how inclusive technologies can support collective empowerment, whether through civic participation, accessible design, or climate action. She sees the chapter as an opportunity to build cross-institutional collaborations, amplify women’s contributions to socially impactful technologies, and inspire the next generation of women and underrepresented groups to shape a more equitable digital future.