I am a PhD Candidate at the Information School at the University of Washington (UW), specializing in human-computer interaction (HCI). I am co-advised by Professors Andrew J. Ko and Jacob O. Wobbrock. I am a member of the DUB group, the USE research group and the AIM research group. I was one of the inaugural recipients of the Facebook PhD Fellowship in 2010 and Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Award in 2009.

In summer 2011, I was an intern with the User Research team at Facebook in Palo Alto, CA. In summer 2010, I was an intern at Autodesk Research in Toronto, Canada, under the supervision of Dr. Tovi Grossman.

As part of my dissertation research, I have a developed LemonAid, a new selection-based contextual crowdsourced help system for web applications. LemonAid allows users to find questions and answers from other users by selecting a label, widget, link, image or other user interface element, eliminating the need to search or post to separate help interfaces. Instead of having predefined answers about application behavior, the novelty of LemonAid is that solutions can be crowdsourced from communities of users.

In addition to designing tools for end users, I also investigate the social and organizational aspects of how software systems are designed and deployed, and how organizations can better achieve user-centered design. I am particularly interested in applications in the field of biomedical and health informatics. I draw upon a variety of methods in my research—from designing and building novel systems to using qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate user needs, assess tool adoption in the field, and study organizational processes.

I received my MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and BSc in Computing Science from Simon Fraser University, Canada.  I worked as a programmer with the Digital Library Group at Princeton University before coming to the University of Washington.

Here is a link to my CV and Research Statement.