David W. McDonald

David W. McDonald is a Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of social behavior and computing systems. He maintains an active research program with numerous Directed Research Groups (DRGs) examining topics including Wikipedia collaboration, social computing, and the application of Large Language Models in design contexts.

Dr. McDonald earned his PhD in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine, with a dissertation titled "Supporting Nuance in Groupware Design: Moving from Naturalistic Expertise Location to Expertise Recommendation." He completed additional graduate work at UC Irvine (MS in Information & Computer Science) and California State University, Hayward (MS in Math & Computer Science), and received his BA in Cognitive Science from UCLA.

His research interests span Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), with particular focus on collaboration in Wikipedia, social matching systems, and behavior change through computational systems. His work examines how computational systems can be designed to interleave with human activity to foster collaboration and healthy behaviors. Recent research has explored social translucence in online communities, crisis communication on TikTok, and applications of Large Language Models for debugging assistance and content moderation.

Dr. McDonald's publications demonstrate a consistent focus on collaborative systems, with key contributions in social computing, Wikipedia research, and health informatics. His work frequently appears in top-tier venues including ACM CSCW, CHI, and AMIA. Recent publications examine the intersection of social media, health communities, and computational analysis of online behavior.

• 2013 Distinguished Paper Award, American Medical Informatics Association Fall Symposium (AMIA)
• 2008 Best Paper Award, AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM)
• 2008 Honorable Mention, ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
• 2003 UW Royalty Research Scholar, University of Washington
• 1999 Regent's Dissertation Fellowship, University of California, Irvine
• 1983 Chancellor's Scholar, University of California, Los Angeles

Dr. McDonald has served as a Program Director for the Human Centered Computing (HCC), Network Science and Engineering (NetSE), and Social Computational Systems (SoCS) programs at the National Science Foundation. His professional affiliations include the Association for Computing Machinery (since 1999) and ACM SIGCHI (since 1999). He has also co-edited the influential book "HCI Remixed: Essays on Works that have Influenced the HCI Community" (MIT Press, 2008).