Nivedita Arora of Northwestern University is the recipient of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for her dissertation “Sustainable Interactive Wireless Stickers: From Materials to Devices to Applications. Honorable Mentions for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Gabriele Farina of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and William Kuszmaul of Harvard University.
Arora’s research envisions creating sustainable computational materials that operate by harvesting energy from the environment and, at the end of their life cycle, can be responsibly composted or recycled. Her research process involves working at the intersection of materials, methods of fabrication, low-power systems, and HCI . She actively looks to apply her work to application domains such as smart homes, health, climate change, and wildlife monitoring.
Arora is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science Department, as well as the Allen K. and Johnnie Cordell Breed Jr. Professor of Design at Northwestern University. Her research involves rethinking the computing stack from a sustainability-first approach for its entire life-cycle: manufacturing, operation, and disposal. Arora received a PhD in Computer Science and an MS In Human-Computer Interaction from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
