[ 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! I'll be recruiting several PhD students, postdocs, and research interns soon, thanks to CISPA's generous funding. (I'll write a post about recruiting in early July. Please keep an eye out for it if you're interested in joining my group.) A big thank you to everyone who has helped me, especially my advisor! 😊 ]

I recently finished my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan School of Information and Department of Computer Science & Engineering. My advisor was the incomparable Kentaro Toyama.

My goal is to give users stronger agency over their online interactions and data—especially as emerging technologies increasingly threaten that agency. To me, this means that any individual, regardless of demographics or socio-economic status, should be able to freely carve out the interactions they want on a system, or have a say over how tech companies use their data. One of my core research contributions addresses this challenge by introducing a consent-centered approach to technology design.

Consent is fundamentally about ensuring individuals—especially those with less power—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 privacy, safety, and agency. (I have focused on general users, but have recently expanded my interested to artists and other creators due to generative AI.) Specifically, I have:

• theorized what affirmative consent is—drawing from feminist literature, which stresses a culture of care and impacts on marginalized groups, I proposed a theoretical framework of affirmative consent to reimagine social platforms (CHI 2021)
• built consentful systems and interfaces—e.g., 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 CHI, CSCW, and PoPETs. My research has been recognized with a Meta Research PhD Fellowship (selected on my fourth try), University of Michigan Barbour Scholarship, EECS Rising Star, and two honorable mentions.