Prof. Dr. Lizbeth Goodman

PROF. DR. LIZBETH GOODMAN

Prof. Dr. Lizbeth Goodman is the Chair of Creative Technology Innovation and Professor of Inclusive Design for Education at the College of Engineering & Architecture, University College Dublin, where she also directs the Inclusive Design Research Centre of Ireland, in partnership with SMARTlab. This partnership developed the award-winning practice-based PhD Programme along with the associated MAGIC Multimedia and Games Innovation Centre and Gamelab, which Lizbeth designed with industry collaborators.

Prior to joining UCD, Lizbeth was the Director of Research for Futurelab—Lord David Puttnam’s think tank for the future of education—and served in that capacity on the Prime Minister’s SHINE Panel.

As Chair of the Royal Irish Academy’s Social Sciences Committee in 2012 and Athena Swan lead for Engineering & Architecture, Lizbeth and her teams specialize in developing ground-up technology solutions with and for people of all levels of cognitive and physical ability.

In the knowledge transfer domain, she founded the MAGIC (Multimedia and Games Innovation Centre) in East London in 2005, bringing together industry and NGO players with scholars and artist-practitioners across disciplines in what was London’s first fully open-source/open-access 3D printing and games lab.

She is the author/editor of 14 books and many peer-reviewed papers. She has supervised 55 PhDs to successful completion in the areas of Creative Technology Innovation, Virtual Worlds, Inclusive Design, Digital Media, Future Foresighting, ICT4D, Assistive Technologies for People with Disabilities and the Elderly, Technology Futures, Wearables and SMART Textiles, Performance Technologies, Assistive Tech, Technology-Enhanced Learning for Health and Well-Being, Connected Health, Personalized Electronic Health Systems, Digital Materialization, Haptic and HCI Integrated Studies, as well as what Lizbeth calls ‘Meaningful Games’ or Mobile Games for Learning. She is on the jury and chair of many councils and foundations, including the Fulbright Commission (for which she is currently Chair of Judges for the TechImpact Awards) and the Canadian Innovation Fund.

She was Chair of Judges for the European Commission’s HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) call in 2013-4 and evaluates for the EC on SaferInternet+ and Future Emerging Tech. An expert in Digital Inclusion, she specializes in working with people who do not have physical voices, whether due to disability, injury, illiteracy, or other factors.

For seven years, she worked with Microsoft on their largest-ever community engagement project (Clubtech), which has transformed the education of over 7 million children and young people worldwide. She is well-known as an expert in interdisciplinary Art-Technology initiatives including STEAM (Arts in STEM) and G-STEM (Women and Gender Balance in STEM).

For the BBC, she researched and presented the Art Works Programme for six years on TV and radio. She is Lead Education Expert in Ireland for the TG4 television series BB Agus Bella (a magical world in which all the creatures are equally ‘abled’ in extraordinary ways) and is advising on two new children’s animation TV series.

She is currently collaborating with partners in the European Parliament on a new Roadmap for Responsible Open Innovation. In 2018, she launched the Academy4theFuture at Davos, and in 2019 she and the team returned to Davos to announce the Women Economic Forum (WEF) Awards to eminent women in STEM, which were delivered at the UNDP summit in New York in October 2020.

A WEF Awardee of Women of the Decade, she has numerous accolades to her credit, including Best Woman in Academia and Best Woman in Technology by the Blackberry Rim international awards panel.