Marilyn Tremaine

Marilyn Mantei Tremaine is an American computer scientist, an expert in human-computer interaction and considered a pioneer of the field. She received a BS in mathematics, physics and French from the University of Wisconsin and in 1982 a PhD in communication theory at the University of Southern California, with the last two years of her PhD spent at Carnegie Mellon University under Professor Allen Newell. She was a lecturer and assistant professor at the University of Michigan Business School, associate professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Toronto from 1988, professor at Drexel University, professor and chair of the Information Systems Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology from 2001, and a research professor at Rutgers University in 2008; she now teaches as an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto. She co-founded ACM SIGCHI and was its president from 1999 to 2002, and she received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2005 and was elected into the ACM CHI Academy in 2022. She is known for psychology studies of early interactive user interfaces, collaborative software, and for developing a framework for cost-justifying usability engineering.