Professor of Design Computing
Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Planning
The University of Sydney
mary [at] arch.usyd.edu.au

Deputy Director, Information and Intelligent Systems
Computer and Information Science and Engineering
National Science Foundation
mmaher [at] nsf.gov

Mary Lou Maher is Professor of Design Computing in the Design Lab at The University of Sydney. Mary Lou completed a Bachelor of Engineering in Civil Engineering at Columbia University in 1979, and a Master of Science and PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, completing the PhD in 1984.

Mary Lou is currently the Deputy Director of the Information and Intelligent Systems Division at the National Science Foundation in the United States. She is establishing a research emphasis on CreativeIT.

Her research interests centre around design computing, specifically in developing and understanding the role of computational systems in enhancing creativity and the quality of human design. Current research topics are: design in and for 3D virtual worlds, collaborative virtual environments, motivated reinforcement learning models of curious agents in virtual worlds, and the impact of tangible interfaces on design cognition.