NEW YORK — The Association for Computing Machinery’s council on Women in Computing named Lewiston native Susan T. Dumais of Microsoft Research as the 2014-15 Athena Lecturer.

Dumais introduced novel algorithms and interfaces for interactive retrieval that have made it easier for people to find, use and make sense of information.

Her research, at the intersection of human-computer interaction and information retrieval, has broad applications for understanding and improving searching and browsing from the Internet to the desktop.

The Athena Lecturer award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. It includes a $10,000 honorarium provided by Google Inc.

The author of more than 200 articles on information science, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science, Dumais holds several patents on novel retrieval algorithms and interfaces.

Dumais is Distinguished Scientist and Deputy Managing Director of the Microsoft Research Lab in Redmond, Wash.

Previously, at Bellcore and Bell Labs, she worked on latent semantic indexing.

She is an adjunct professor at the University of Washington, and has been a visiting faculty member at Stevens Institute of Technology, New York University, and the University of Chicago.

She is a graduate of Bates College with a bachelor of science degree in mathematics and psychology and a doctoral degree from Indiana University in cognitive and mathematical psychology.