Melissa Chen
I design sociotechnical learning environments to support novice computing students' motivation, self-efficacy, and learning.
I am a fourth 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 an interdisciplinary, design-based researcher at the intersection of human-computer interaction and computing education working to understand how to design sociotechnical systems that support students' computing self-efficacy.
I graduated with a B.S. in computer science and a minor in math from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2022. As an undergraduate researcher, my research interests varied greatly and included machine learning for satellite crop monitoring (at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications) and quantitatively understanding disparities in self and peer evaluations in group work settings (in the ORCHID Lab).