Lizbeth Goodman

Professor Lizbeth Goodman is Chair of Creative Technology Innovation and Full Professor of Inclusive Design for Engineering and Education at University College Dublin (Ireland), where she directs the Inclusive Design Research Centre of Ireland at UCD (IDRC) within the College of Engineering and Architecture, in collaboration with SMARTlab. She is Programme Director for the Thematic PhD in the College of E&A as UCD’s only fully interdisciplinary PhD.

She has held a Personal Chair in Creative Technology Innovation, with a focus on interdisciplinary practice-based research into the future of Inclusive Interdisciplinary Research and Cross-sectoral Impact, since 2005. She was elected to Chair the Social Sciences Panel of the Royal Irish Academy in 2012. In 2018 she was named Director of the Academy of the Future with XR Impact and the UN IGO for Sustainability. In 2019 she was nominated as President of the WEF Ireland-India Women’s Council to support the European WEF Women’s Leadership Panel with ground-up microenterprise solutions designed inclusively with communities of women in India, after being named Woman of the Decade in Innovation by WEF. In April 2020, she was selected to co-chair the Women in Science and Technology Leadership Group for the Intelligence in Science Forum EU-Africa, providing high level inputs to the European Parliament and European Commission.

Previously, she was Director of Research for Futurelab – Lord David Puttnam’s thinktank for the future of Education in the UK- and served in that capacity on the Prime Minister’s SHINE Panel.

In 2008, Prof Goodman was awarded the two top industry prizes for Best Woman in the Academic and Public Sectors, and Outstanding Woman in Technology by Blackberry Rim and a global industry panel. In 2003 she was honoured in Times Square, NYC with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Volunteer Service to Women and Children for her work with the charity she founded, SafetyNET, and parallel work with Microsoft on the Clubtech Programme, and with the Carl Sagan Discovery Centre and Children’s Health Fund. She is also VP of SpecialEffect: creating multimodal interfaces and eye- gaze systems for children and young people with complex needs and unlimited potential. She was lead advisor on the HOPE Project (Hospital-based Online Persistent Pediatric Environments) with Harvard Med and Johns Hopkins Medical, and directed the TRUST project (healthy noncompetitive gaming for kids in hospital) with the Montefiore Children’s Hospital in New York, the Harlem Children’s Zone, and the KK Hospital for Women and Children in Singapore (with the NTU Gamelab) and the Central Remedial Clinic in Dublin, Ireland.

She is the author and editor of 14 books and many papers and articles, and has hosted TV and online broadcasts for the BBC for many years.