Sean Rintel
Senior Principal Research Manager
Microsoft Research Lab – Cambridge (Remote - Australia)
Senior Principal Research Manager
Microsoft Research Lab – Cambridge (Remote - Australia)
I am a social scientist of human-computer interaction, exploring distributed team collaboration and AI workflows at Microsoft Research. I work in Brisbane, Australia, reporting to the Cambridge UK Lab.
I am currently part of the People-Centric AI team, which develops knowledge, model capabilities, and experiences that enable human agency and skill, support creativity and collaboration, and ensure equitable representation and participation. I also lead the Intentional Meetings workstream, which investigates how to evolve purposful meeting systems, behaviors, and cultures with Generative AI.
My training is in qualitative sociology (Ethnomethodology, to be precise), drawing on video-recorded conversations and ethnographic data, and analysing that data using qualitative methods such as conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis.
I specialize in field research but also conduct interview, diary, and survey studies, as well as lab-based studies of prototypes. Increasingly, however, I combine qualitative with quantitative approaches, such as surveys and telemetry, to answer questions at scale.
I have been a member of a global Grand Prize winning project, five global category First Place projects, and one global category Second Place project in the annual Microsoft Hackathon.
One of these Hackathon projects is on the Garage Wall of Fame: Mobile Sharing and Companion Experiences for Microsoft Teams Meetings. This was the first prize winning project that I was on, and it became a feature in Microsoft Teams.
I am a Partner Investigator on the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quality Work in the Digital Age (2026-2032).
I received my PhD in 2010 in the field of Sociology specializing in Communication, from the University at Albany, State University of New York. My dissertation was chaired by Professor Emerita Anita Pomerantz with committee members Professor Teresa Harrison, Professor Glenna Spitze, and Professor Ronald Jacobs.
Prior to working at Microsoft, I was a Lecturer in Strategic Communication at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.