I received my PhD in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego. I was advised by Dr. Scott Klemmer in the Design Lab. My dissertation examined interactive strategies and tools to support exploratory thinking in creative work. Prior to my PhD, I graduated from UC Berkeley with Honors in Psychology and worked as a research assistant at the Stanford Cognitive & Systems Neuroscience Lab studying math cognition in children. Outside of research, I enjoy attempting to exercise through boxing, being mediocre at video games, meddling on the piano, and volunteering as a "cat cuddler" at the Humane Animal Rescue of Pittsburgh!
***I am currently on the job market for both academic and industry research positions!***Professional development in fields where interactions with people are critical for professional success is often impersonal and infrequent. In this project, we collaborate with researchers, professionals, faculty, and K-12 teachers to design tools to scale human obervation and provide automated multimodal analytics through ubiquitous sensing systems in the classroom and workplace. My work aims to understand perceptions and impact around these systems, particularly with regards to ethical AI, privacy, and social dynamics.
DIS '23 (Honorable Mention)
Teachers in low-infrastructure contexts face challenges related to technology, economic, and environmental infrastructure. In this project, we designed a social media-based chatbot to help teachers in rural Côte d'Ivoire get quick, automated guidance and facilitate communication within their communities of practice.
In any creative domain, novices have difficulty exploring the potential space of possibilities because they don't yet have the domain knowledge to know what to explore nor the procedural knowledge to know how to explore. For my PhD dissertation, I studied strategies to help scaffold novices in exploratory thinking and implemented these strategies within creativity support tools.
Dissertation, DIS '21, C&C '19 (Extended abstract), CHI '19 (Honorable Mention), CHI '18 (Honorable Mention), UIST '17 (Demo)
Throughout my career, I am fortunate to have had several collaborators in various areas related to creativity, patterning in children, and math cognition.
CogSci '22 (Abstract), C&C '19 (Extended abstract), NPJ '18, Journal of Neuroscience '15
Support Cognitive Science graduate students in teaching roles and work with the Engaged Teaching Center to develop training resources for instructors.
Developed a curriculum for teaching introductory web programming concepts.
Facilitated discussions of current issues in social computing research.
Helped students conceptualize and prototype innovative startup ideas.
Lead studios and guide students through the human-centered design process to develop a mobile web application.
Lead discussions about the origins of laughter and humor from a cognitive and social perspective.
Lead discussion sessions with active learning strategies to help students review and consolidate course material.
Provide critiques in studios to help students analyze design concepts through group-based projects.
CMU Human-Computer Interaction Institute
UCSD Cognitive Science
The Design Lab
Early Learning & Cognition Lab