ACM has named ACM President Vicki L. Hanson to the position of executive director and CEO for a two-year term effective July 1, 2018.
As ACM’s most senior staff member, Hanson will work with ACM’s volunteer community to provide strategic vision and to develop sustainable business models to ensure ACM’s continued worldwide membership, publications and revenue growth.
“I am delighted that Vicki has accepted the role of ACM CEO,” said ACM President-elect Cherri M. Pancake. “Having served ACM for many years in various volunteer capacities, Vicki’s unique insights into the organization and how it serves the profession should serve us well to ensure a sustainable future for ACM. I’m glad that she will be in a position to expand the efforts she initiated as President in outreach to practitioners and young computing professionals. I look forward to collaborating with her on these issues and many more in the coming months.”
Hanson said of her new position, “I am deeply honored and humbled to serve as ACM’s CEO. I look forward to working with ACM’s incredible volunteers and excellent staff to make progress on the exciting opportunities and challenges facing the organization, including its evolution as a fully international society, one that addresses the needs and workstyles of a new generation of computing professionals, as well as the transformation of its publishing and access models.”
Hanson is an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Chartered Information Technology Professional Fellow of the British Computer Society. She has received the ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award, the ACM SIGACCESS Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility, the Women of Vision ABIE Award for Social Impact, and the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. She has also served on the ACM-W Europe Executive Committee.
Hanson is currently Distinguished Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Visiting Professor at the University of Dundee and Lancaster University. She formerly was a Research Staff Member at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where she founded the Accessibility Research Group. She will be stepping down from the RIT position when she becomes ACM CEO.
