Welcome! I'm a PhD Candidate in the Human-Centered Computing program at Georgia Tech. My work focuses on supporting non-experts in interpreting complicated, conflicting information. For my dissertation, I've studied how and why people seek information to fix technical problems they experience in residential settings, and built a system called Tech Clips that lets people share locally-relevant technology advice with their friends and family.

Recently, I've been branching out into health and wellness research, too. I've been supervising some really talented undergraduate students who are studying online information seeking practices of people suffering sports injuries, including recreational exercisers and highly-competitive college athletes. I'm also a member of a Georgia Tech research team working with Humana to evaluate a long-term deployment of The American Horsepower Challenge, a collaborative online game encouraging physical activity in school-age childen.

While at GT, I've had the opportunity to work with some amazing people. My advisor is Keith Edwards, and my thesis committee includes Gregory Abowd, Beki Grinter, Mark Guzdial, Mike Twidale, and Ellen Zegura. In summer 2008, I interned with Jonathan Grudin at Microsoft Research; together we studied wiki usage in organizational settings.

I'm a member of the ACM US Public Policy Committee and was part of the Sam Nunn Security Program during the 2006-2007 academic year. In the past, I've spent time working at Privacy Office of the US Department of Homeland Security, Sandia National Laboratories, Motorola, SchlumbergerSema, and CERIAS. I graduated from Purdue University with a BS in computer science and Georgia Tech with an MS in computer science. Assuming the universe cooperates, I plan to defend my dissertation in Spring 2010.