Elizabeth F Churchill is a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, where she manages the research area of Internet Experiences. A psychologist by training, for the past 15 years she has drawn on diverse areas to consider how to design effective communication situations both face to face and technologically mediated. Applications developed and/or evaluated include cell phone interfaces, textual and 3d graphical environments, interactive digital posterboards and animated interface personas.

Churchill earned a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Cambridge. Her research was concerned with designing, developing and evaluating computational models of user-device interaction. Prior to her PhD, Churchill's an undergraduate degree was in Experimental Psychology, and her MSc in Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems (both from the University of Sussex).

Churchill has a long standing interest in collaborative problem solving and learning, and on the use of informal, conversational technologies to foster productive information sharing and engender trusting collaborative relationships. She has conducted fieldwork and led design teams in the US, the UK and in Japan to produce research prototypes and social software products. She previously worked at FXPAL, Fuji Xerox's Research laboratory in Silicon Valley where she led the Social Computing Group, and at PARC (the Palo Alto Research Center) where she led research on the design and use of communication technologies and social software among cross-cultural, distributed software engineering teams. Churchill is a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery.