Desney is a Researcher in the Visualization and Interaction Area at Microsoft Research, where he manages the Computational User Experiences group. He also holds an affiliate faculty appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.

Desney's research interests include Human-Computer Interaction and Physiological Computing. He spends large chunks of time applying signal processing and machine learning to recognizing noisy signals, specifically those in or on the human body, and using them in interesting ways. However, he is a somewhat schizophrenic researcher and has worked on projects in many other domains.

Desney received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1996, after which he spent a couple of years building bridges and blowing things up in the Singapore Armed Forces. He later returned to Carnegie Mellon University, where he worked with Randy Pausch and earned his PhD in Computer Science in 2004. In 2007, Desney was honored as one of MIT Technology Review's Young Innovators Under 35 for his work in brain-computer interfaces.

Desney's homepage is at: http://research.microsoft.com/~desney.