people

Sharon Ferguson is an Assistant Professor in Management Science and Engineering at the University of Waterloo. She is associated with the Future of Work Institute, the Games Institute and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. She completed her Bachelors and PhD in Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, supervised by Dr. Alison Olechowski.

Her research combines theories from Management and Psychology with methods from Human-Computer Interaction to design technologies that support effective collaboration in remote and hybrid working arrangements. She is interested in understanding the various ways that modern work is changing, and designing technology to enable effective collaboration regardless of where and when team members work. She also studies how large language models are used for subjective scenarios, and the risks that this use poses. Passionate about increasing diversity in STEM, she also leads a multi-year, multi-institution project investigating student persistence in AI. Her publications can be found on her Google Scholar.