[ I'm very thankful and excited to share that I will be joining CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, an institution within the Helmholtz Association, as a tenure-track faculty member in Fall 2025! A big thank you to everyone who has helped me, especially my advisor! 😊 I'll be recruiting PhD students and a postdoc. I will also hire 1-2 research intern(s). (I'll soon post about the topics I'm interested in, what kind of students I'm looking for, and my thoughts on mentoring.) ]

I recently finished my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan School of Information and Department of Computer Science & Engineering, where I was also a Meta Research PhD Fellow (selected on my fourth try). My advisor was the incomparable Kentaro Toyama.

As a Human-Computer Interaction reseracher, my goal is to build systems that give users stronger agency over their online interactions and data—especially as emerging technologies increasingly threaten that agency. To me, this means that within ethical realms, any individual, regardless of demographics or socio-economic status, should be able to freely carve out the interpersonal interactions they want on a system, or have a say over how tech companies use their data.

One of my core research contributions addresses such problems by introducing a consent-centered approach to technology design (CHI 2021). Consent is fundamentally about ensuring individuals—especially those who tend to be vulnerable—have full agency to decide whether and how an interaction should occur. For example, sex education emphasizes that only after a person with less power—due to factors like physical differences or social norms—grants consent, should the other party engage in a sexual interaction. In short, consent ensures that the weakest power-holder can exercise their agency.

I design and build digital systems that center the consent of users—who often hold less power than system creators—to better support users’ nuanced needs around agency, privacy, and safety. Some systems I have built include: Moa, a platform that enables sensitive information-sharing among people with less power, by letting users flexibly and precisely carve out an audience per post/comment through "consent boundaries"; consent-granting mechanisms regarding tech companies' data collection and algorithmic inferences (CHI 2023, CHI 2024)

I tend to publish in top-tier HCI venues (e..g, CHI, CSCW) and privacy-related ones (e.g., PoPETs).

My research has been recognized with a Meta Research PhD Fellowship, University of Michigan Barbour Scholarship, EECS Rising Star, and two honorable mentions.