Lilly Christine Irani is an Iranian-American academic whose research spans topics in computer science, communication studies, feminist studies, entrepreneurship, and microwork. She is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.
Irani graduated in 2004 from Stanford University with both a bachelor's degree in the Science, Technology, and Society program and a master's degree in computer science, specializing in human-computer interaction. After working in user interface design at Google from 2003 to 2007, she returned to graduate school, completing a Ph.D. in informatics at the University of California, Irvine in 2013. Her dissertation, Designing Citizens in Transnational India, was supervised by Paul Dourish.
She joined the University of California, San Diego faculty as an assistant professor of communications in 2013, and was tenured as an associate professor in 2019. In 2023, she became the inaugural Faculty Director of the UC San Diego Labor Center.
Irani is the author of the book Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019), which won the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for Science, Technology, Engineering, or Medicine of the American Anthropological Association as well as the 2020 Outstanding Book Award of the International Communication Association. She is also the coauthor, with Jesse Marx, of the book Redacted (Taller California Books, 2021).
Her journal and conference papers include: