I am Vice Provost for Academic Personnel at UC Irvine. In my professor life, I am a Chancellor’s Professor and the Robert A. and Barbara L. Kleist Professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences and in the School of Education, School of Medicine, and School of Social Ecology at UC Irvine. My research interests are in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, assistive and educational technologies, and health informatics. I design, develop, deploy, and evaluate technologies to empower people to use collected data to address real human needs in sensitive and ethically responsible ways.
I am a Jacobs Foundation Senior Research Fellow alumna. I am an alumna of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech and the College of Arts and Sciences at Vanderbilt University. I also love to make cakes.
If you need to schedule time with me, please reach out to Kellie Kamimoto (kkamimot @ uci). She will screen requests with me and do her best to make it happen or direct you to the right place if it is not me.
Things I hope you might pay attention to right now:
- I am an acquiring editor for the Springer Nature Synthesis on Health and Technology book series. Please email me (and Kellie) if you think you might want to write a book!
- I am co-editing a special issue of TACCESS on accessibility and play with Kate Ringland and Annuska Zolyomi. Please submit: https://dl.acm.org/pb-assets/static_journal_pages/taccess/pdfs/ACM-TACCESS-CfP-SI-Play-Accessibility.pdf
- I’ve written some non-academic things:
- Leading People Who Don’t Want to be Led: https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/career-advice/advancing-administrator/2026/05/12/leading-people-who-dont-want-be-led
- Peer-Review is Breaking Under its Own Weight: https://www.chronicle.com/article/peer-review-is-breaking-under-its-own-weight?sra=true
- It’s Time for a Professionalized Research University: https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/career-advice/2023/01/23/research-university-needs-professionalization-opinion
- The Promises and Perils of Masters Degrees: https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2021/11/16/five-strategies-ensuring-value-masters-degrees-opinion
For students: If you are already a student at UCI and are interested in working with me, please check out the STAR group web page to get a sense of the kind of work my lab does and our lab manual to see if you would be a good fit in other ways. As always, my students and I are not brilliant at keeping these things up to date, so my google scholar page is usually a good place to look as well. Be sure to sort by year so you see the most recent stuff not the most cited.
Undergraduate and Masters students should commit to at least two quarters of research if you want to join our lab, with exceptions made for summer programs. You may choose to do research as part of an honors thesis or independent study or in some cases, depending on my current funding, you can be hired. You should read my lab manual before you reach out to me, and then you should fill out our interest form.
If you are a prospective PhD student who wants to be advised by me, you should consider a co-advisor as well and mention me in your application materials. You should read this to see if you are a good fit before you reach out: https://www.gillianhayes.com/so-you-want-to-get-a-phd/ I will aboslutely know if you do not read first.
For people asking me for service: Given the load of being VP for Academic Personnel, I have to be somewhat limited in my service. I do review papers and write tenure and promotion letters. However, I have had to make priorities within these activities and am not able to do as much as I might have in the past. I predominantly accept review requests for which I am truly an expert and will do my best to point you to reviewers who are more expert than I am in other cases.
Update for 2026-2027 tenure letters: I have already agreed to write several letters for this cycle before we have even reached the mid-point of 2026. So, I am mostly likely going to turn you down unless I am really the right person to write this letter. There are limited people who can write full and Step 6 letters for the UC system, so those will be prioritized over tenure letters. Also, I am particularly careful with potential conflicts of interest given my role as VPAP on campus. So please do not reach out for a letter for anyone with whom I have co-authored either a paper or a grant in the last four years.
Research: Check out the STAR Group Web page for information on my research group. Please see my CV for most up to date publications listing. Check out my Google scholar page for details on citations, co-authors, and so on.
Open Access: I maintain an archive of my own funded research proposals online, along with the rationale for doing so here. Please check to see if you what you want is there. If not, it may be because a Co-PI has asked me not to share the work or the sponsor does not allow it. I have also added my tenure materials and my LOI for the grad dean job at UCI. Please note, none of these things are models. Everyone is different, and I have had way more proposals rejected than funded.
How to get in touch with me: (please use the correct set of things depending on why you are contacting me)
Academic Personnel
550 Aldrich Hall
Provost’s Office
University of California, Irvine
hayesg @uci.edu for UCI and Academic Personnel issues
In these cases, you will often want to copy Kellie Kamimoto (kkamimot @uci) as well.
Professor of ICS
5084 Donald Bren Hall
Department of Informatics
Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
University of California, Irvine
gillianrh @ics.uci.edu for ICS, research, and student related inquiries
photo: Steve Zylius/UCI