Marianna Obrist is a Reader (Multisensory Experiences) at the School of Engineering and Informatics, at the University of Sussex. She leads the Sussex Computer Human Interaction Lab, a research group dedicated to the investigation of tactile, olfactory, and gustatory experiences.

Before joining Sussex, she was a Marie Curie Fellow at Newcastle University and prior to this an Assistant Professor for Human-Computer Interaction and Usability at the University of Salzburg.

Despite the fact that interactive technologies have permeated our environment (e.g., mobile, ubiquitous, social computing) and have become an essential part of our everyday life (e.g., work, leisure, education, health, etc.), the way we interact with them is still limited. Interactive systems stimulate dominantly our senses of vision and hearing, partly our sense of touch (e.g., vibration in mobile phones), while our senses of taste and smell are widely neglected and under-exploited in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research.