Marti Hearst

Marti Hearst is a Professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, with a zero-percent appointment in the Computer Science Division. She is affiliated with the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR), Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), and EPIC Data Lab.

Her academic foundation was built entirely at UC Berkeley:

• B.A. in Computer Science (1985)
• M.S. in Computer Science (1989)
• Ph.D. in Computer Science (1994)

Her pioneering research spans Human-Computer Interaction, Information Retrieval, and Natural Language Processing, with seminal contributions to search user interfaces (authoring the first book on the subject), information visualization, and computational linguistics. She bridges technical NLP systems with user-centered design principles, particularly in learning-at-scale environments like MOOCs.

Her accolades include:

• ACM Fellow (2013)
• ACM SIGIR Academy Member (2021)
• ACM SIGCHI Academy Member (2017)
• NSF CAREER Award (2000)
• Hellman Fellowship (2000)
• Okawa Research Grant (1998)
• IBM Faculty Award
• Two Google Research Awards
• Four Excellence in Teaching Awards

As a dedicated mentor, she has guided 11 Ph.D. students through dissertations spanning programming education, dialogue systems, and citizen science. Her research is supported by NSF, Google, IBM, and the Okawa Foundation, focusing on making complex information systems accessible through innovative interface design.

She actively contributes to BAIR's AI research, BCNM's digital media initiatives, and EPIC Data Lab's applied data science projects, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration across Berkeley's research ecosystem.