I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at University of Colorado Boulder, where I also received a M.S. in Computer Science. I am part of Project EPIC (Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis) working with Professor Leysia Palen, and I am a graduate student research affiliate with the Natural Hazards Center. My research focuses on the diffusion of forecast and other risk visuals on social media during hurricanes and how people make sense of representations of risk and uncertainty.

I recently completed an internship with the User Experience Research team for Yahoo Mail at Oath in Sunnyvale, CA.

Research areas: human-centered computing, crisis informatics, social computing, computer-supported cooperative work

Previously, I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Santa Clara University. My interest in human-centered computing comes from several of my experiences throughout college, including training rural women in IT skills in India, developing a mobile app for local homeless people in the Bay Area, and leading a group of high school girls as they learned programming and mobile development.

News

• January 7, 2019: I presented my research on how people construct and manage uncertainty around hurricane risk images on “The Other Uncertainty: Social, Political, and Cultural Forms of Uncertainty in Weather Contexts” panel at the 99th Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society in Phoenix, AZ.

• January 6, 2019: I am excited to have two papers accepted to CHI 2019 this year! Communicating Hurricane Risks: Multi-Method Examination of Risk Imagery Diffusion with Julie Demuth, James Dykes, and Leysia Palen, as well as Understanding Online News Behaviors with Frank Bentley, Katie Quehl and Jordan Wirfs-Brock.

• September 11, 2018: I was interviewed by Denver news station KDVR on my research about how people interpret hurricane forecast images. Read and watch the article and video.

• May 2018: I am interning at Yahoo/Oath with the User Experience Research team in Sunnyvale, CA this summer (2018)!

• March 13, 2018: I successfully defended my dissertation proposal and am now a Ph.D. candidate! Thanks to my committee: Leysia Palen, Clayton Lewis, Brian Keegan, Ken Anderson, and Julie Demuth.

• My paper Visual Representations of Disaster, cowritten with Leysia Palen and Chris Bopp, was accepted to CSCW 2017.

• I received a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for my research proposal: “Image-Based Social Media Communication in Disaster Events.”

• I was interviewed for my alma mater’s weekly newspaper, The Santa Clara: Graduate Makes Waves in Data Mining

• While attending SC15 in Austin, I was interviewed for Science Node, an online science publication: Mining Social Media to Manage Crises