I am a third year Ph.D. candidate in computer science and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow (NSF GRFP) at Northwestern University, advised by Professor Eleanor O’Rourke in the Delta Lab. I am a design-based researcher working to understand ahd support student motivation, self-efficacy, and self-assessments.

Prior to starting at Northwestern, I graduated with a B.S. in computer science (with a minor in math) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2022.

I am looking for summer 2025 internships related to HCI for education and programming!

Research interests

My research focus is on understanding why students think they are doing poorly in common moments in the programming process, like stopping to think or looking something up on the internet. These are all things we do when we code, and certainly we expect novices to do it, so why do they think they are doing badly and how can we design to support them?

Some past work includes:

• Designing an AI-based, in-IDE intervention to help normalize these programming moments while students code
• Understanding the reasoning that students use for their negative self-assessments

My current work builds on this to explore:

• Factors related to students usage of particular reasons and sources
• How we co-design interventions with intro CS instructors to support accurate self-assessments

In my work, I leverage theories and methods from computing education, human-computer interaction, design research, and the learning sciences. I also leverage some technical skills from my time in software engineering and machine learning research. I am primarily a qualitative researcher, but also have familiarity with quantitative methods from previous experiences

Hobbies

When I’m not busy with research, I’m usually trying to do something creative. Lately, I’ve been playing piano, learning how to bake bread, and figuring out how to make a good cup of coffee.