Professor Shaun Lawson

Head of School

School: Computer Science

Shaun is Professor of Social Computing and Head of the Department of Computer & Information Sciences at Northumbria University. He is Director of the University's £9.5 million UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Citizen Centred AI, and he leads the University's Peak of Research Excellence in Computerised Society and Digital Citizens. He was formerly lead for the Northumbria Social Computing (NorSC) Research Group which he founded when moved to Northumbria in 2015. Prior to joining Northumbria he founded and led, for 10 years, the Lincoln Social Computing (LiSC) Research Centre at the University of Lincoln. His research lies at the boundaries between computing, design and the social sciences, and explores the use and significance of social media, and other collaborative and participatory digital services, in people’s lives. This includes a focus on the design, implementation and evaluation of new social platforms, applications and services as well as analysis of text, speech and image data. He was appointed the UK’s first Professor in Social Computing in 2011. He has conducted applied and cross-disciplinary work in areas including mental health and wellbeing, politics, activism, animal behaviour and sustainability. He has held, as PI, grants totalling over £12 million from funders such as EPSRC, ESRC, the EU, Microsoft Research, as well as industry, and is the co-author of over 200 peer-reviewed publications. He is the founding chair of the UK’s SIGCHI chapter, and a full member of both EPSRC and ESRC Peer Review Colleges.

Campus Address

Room 215
Pandon Building

Email Shaun

@shaunlawson

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Breaking Infectious Disease Stigma: The Unusual Case of COVID-19 Test Sharing on Twitter During the Pandemic, Le Moignan, E., Mahoney, J., Lawson, S. 9 Mar 2026, In: Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies
PARTICIPATE-AI: Exploring the Participatory Turn in Citizen-Centred AI, Briggs, P., Conati, C., Lawson, S., Montague, K., Nicolau, H., Pires, A., Stein, S., Vines, J. 22 Mar 2026, Companion Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI 2026 Companion, New York, United States, ACM
SIG on Participatory AI: Identifying Research Gaps and Building Community Infrastructure for Citizen-Centred AI, Montague, K., Lawson, S., Briggs, P., Nisi, V., Jardim Nunes, N., Nicolau, H. 14 Oct 2025, CHItaly '25: Proceedings of the 16th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter, New York, NY, United States, ACM
DCitizens Roles Unveiled: SIG Navigating Identities in Digital Civics and the Spectrum of Societal Impact, Carter, A., Montague, K., Talhouk, R., Lawson, S., Nicolau, H., Pires, A., Rohde, M., Del Bue, A., Knearem, T. 11 May 2024, CHI 2024 - Extended Abstracts of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Sytems, New York, USA, ACM
DCitizens Roles Unveiled: SIG Navigating Identities in Digital Civics and the Spectrum of Societal Impact, Carter, A., Montague, K., Talhouk, R., Lawson, S., Nicolau, H., Pires, A., Rohde, M., Bue, A., Knearem, T. 6 Jul 2024
Designing for and with the ‘Digital Citizen’, Kirk, D., Boztepe, S., Christiansson, J., De Götzen, A., Ehrenberg, N., Grönvall, E., Lawson, S., Linde, P., Saad-Sulonen, J., Vlachokyriakos, V. 1 Jul 2024, DIS '24 Companion, New York, United States
Embedding Thinking Strategies within a Tangible Tree to Orchestrate Small Group Brainstorming, Melniczuk, A., Kang, N., Lawson, S. 11 Feb 2024, TEI 2024 - Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, New York, ACM
More than Human Digital Civics, Gowland, S., Scott, L., Handley, G., Carter, A., Lawson, S., van der Linden, D. 2 Dec 2024, ACI '24: Proceedings of the International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction, New York, USA, ACM
Designing Technology-Mediated Peer Support for Postgraduate Research Students at Risk of Loneliness and Isolation, Harrison, D., Rowland, S., Wood, G., Bakewell, L., Petridis, I., Long, K., Vasileiou, K., Barnett, J., Barreto, M., Wilson, M., Lawson, S., Vines, J. 7 Mar 2023, In: ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
Social Media and Migration Studies, Mahoney, J., Lawson, S., Ambrosetti, E., Bertel, D., Leonardelli, E. 28 Apr 2023, 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2023

PGR Supervision

Garry Elvin Intelligent Conversational Dialogue Agents to Support the Mental Health and Wellbeing of University Students Start Date: 01/06/2019 End Date: 30/05/2025