About me

I'm a National Library of Medicine Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington Biomedical & Health Informatics Division, where I work with Professor Wanda Pratt and the iMed Research Group.

I study how social computing technology can empower people to help each other with their everyday health and wellness. I design pervasive technologies to encourage and enable new forms of social support online and offline, and I work with participants to shape both the technical systems and in-the-wild deployments.

In my dissertation research, I designed and deployed StepStream, a social pervasive health system for middle school students to share and encourage everyday fitness activity. StepStream is a multi-week pervasive health deployment consisting of an after school program, wireless pedometers and a social network site. I've used it to better understand how online social activity can motivate offline health behaviors in youth, and I designed the system in collaboration with students from a local middle school.

I hold a PhD in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech, an MS in Human-Computer Interaction also from Georgia Tech, and a BA in Cognitive Science from Occidental College.

News

CHI 2015 publication

Our paper “This Digital Life: A Neighborhood-based Study of Adolescents' Lives Online” will be presented at the 2015 CHI conference in Seoul, Korea this April. Read the PDF. Congrats to my co-author Jessica Pater.

Attending CSCW 2015

I'll be attending the Computer Supported Cooperative Work conference in Vancouver this March, as well as participating in the "Moving Beyond e-Health and the Quantified Self" workshop.

WISH/AMIA 2014

I attended the WISH Symposium and AMIA 2014 in Washington, DC this November. At WISH, I presented my paper “Peer Influence in a Self-Tracking Pervasive Fitness Systems for Adolescents: A Comparison Study.”

If you’d like to learn more about my research, find me using the Contact page and say hello! Puns encouraged.