Associate Professor, Georgia Tech
Director, Tandem Lab
President, ACM SIGCHI
Chair, ACM SIG Governing Board

I am an Associate Professor at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. I work on responsible and sustainable human-centered computing, investigating infrastructures of care, to inform the design and maintenance of such infrastructures leveraging emerging technologies. Pursuing community-engaged research, I foreground worker-centered perspectives and community wellbeing in contexts surrounding care. My work on planetary care bridges scholarship on sustainability and development in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I have been awarded the NSF CAREER for my research, in addition to receiving more than a dozen awards and recognitions at premier HCI venues. I am grateful to have been recognized at Georgia Tech for research, teaching, and leadership impact. I have served as President of ACM SIGCHI since 2021 and Chair of the ACM SIG Governing Board since 2024.

I earned my Ph.D. in Information Management Systems from UC Berkeley, specializing in Human—Computer Interaction. I got my Master’s in Computer Science and Education from Stanford University, and Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Applied Math from UC Berkeley.  I worked as Research Associate in the University of Washington, where I was mentored by Profs. Richard Anderson and Gaetano Borriello in Computer Science and Engineering. I was also at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication as a postdoctoral researcher. Many schools and many mascots, but I remain loyal to the California bear <3.

At Georgia Tech, I lead the Tandem Lab, where my students and I work with individuals, communities, and other stakeholders to inform the design and adoption of emerging technologies in varied resource-constrained contexts. Read our work. Prior and current Tandem Lab students are committed to changing the world—at inspirit to continue the work we started on virtual reality and learning, and at MakerGhat towards fostering community knowledge networks in resource-constrained parts of Mumbai, India.

I am passionate about community-building, and this is what much my roles at ACM entail—strengthening our ties as a computing community and expanding participation globally. As former Chair of the ACM Future of Computing Academy (ACM FCA), I led a group of committed computer scientists from across the world, aiming to maximize the impact of computing. I organized the X4D Talks, a monthly speaker series aimed at bringing speakers to present a range of perspectives on a topic of common interest across research/practice communities and disciplines that examine computing and development (or “4D”), e.g., the Future of Work (in February 2021) and Sustainability and Development (in March 2021). I have also been an active organizer and proponent of the HCI Across Borders event series since co-founding it in 2015, which has aimed to promote across-borders collaboration in HCI through the years.

Although very much an academic at heart, my industry experience working as a software design engineer on the Office/Powerpoint team at Microsoft Corp. has been fundamental to my professional journey. Equally influential was my volunteering experience for Asha for Education, an education non-profit organization, throughout my undergraduate and graduate years.

You can find me on Medium.