A long-time educator, Abby Goodrum is Professor and founder of the User Experience Design degree program at Wilfrid Laurier University where she teaches courses in User-Centered Design, Information Architecture, and Research Methods. Before this, she was the Vice President for Research at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Prior to her appointment at Laurier, she held the Rogers Research Chair in News, Media, and Technology at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson) where she was also Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Communication and Design. She has also held faculty positions at Syracuse and Drexel Universities in the United States.

A true STEAM researcher, her work bridges multiple disciplines and appears in the journal literature of computer science, humanities, communication studies, information management, and media studies. For more than 20 years, her research has focused on the study of how people seek, use, share, manipulate, store, retrieve, and organize digital multimedia. She was founding Director for Social Science Research in a $23M Canadian Centre of Excellence (NCE GRAND) that served as both a research network and commercialization engine in order to address complex issues in digital media, and transform multidisciplinary research into user-centered solutions.

She’s served on a variety of research committees, management boards and boards of directors including: the Ontario Ministry for Research and Innovation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Endowment for the Humanities (U.S.), the National Science Foundation (U.S.), and the Institute for Museum and Library Studies (U.S.). She has also served on the boards of Canada’s Technology Triangle, the Canadian Digital Media Network, the Accelerator Centre, SHARCNET, the Southern Ontario Water Consortium, and the Ontario Council on University Research. 

In her spare time, Abby likes to make music with her ukulele band: Sonic Uke Ensemble