I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Vermont (UVM). Before joining UVM, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and earned my PhD degree from Drexel University.
My Research asks how people can benefit from data-intensive computing without surrendering privacy, agency, or equitable access. I design and build human-centered security and privacy systems at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI), responsible artificial intelligence (AI), and health informatics. I investigate technical, societal, and interdisciplinary research questions to ensure future data-intensive computing systems are technically capable, ethically grounded, accessible to diverse users, and accountable in the contexts where they operate.
Please see the Students page for my student recruitment plan.
News
(August 2026) Two publications from the American Heart Association-funded Digital Advertisements for Inclusive Trial Accrual (DAITA) project were published! One paper summarizes how motivational themes affect trial recruitment efficiency and the other paper provides a practical tutorial on leveraging social media influencer marketing for clinical trial recruitment.
(July 2026) Check out how we designed the initial version of a privacy label for differential privacy in our paper titled “We need a standard”: Toward an expert-informed privacy label for differential privacy. My doctoral student Mengyi Lu presented this work at PETS 2026 in Calgary, Canada.
(July 2026) My doctoral student Tamunotonye Harry presented his first-authored paper describing how to create more realistic personas beyond fixed pscyhological traits at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026).
(November 2025) My doctoral student Tamunotonye Harry’s first-authored journal article describing how we leveraged web analytics to improve cadiovascular clinical trial recruitment is accetped by the high impact factor medical journal – Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.
(July 2025) Our Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) paper analyzing the landscape of usability studies in differential privacy is accepted by the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PoPETS). The amazing doctoral student and first author Onyinye Dibia presents this work at PETS 2025 in Washington DC.
(August 2024) My first-authored paper, titled “Contextual acceptance of COVID-19 mitigation mobile apps in the United States: Mixed methods survey study on postpandemic data privacy”, has been publihsed in the Journal of Medical Internet Research!
(August 2024) I’m super excited to share our NSF SaTC award with my Co-PI Dr. Joe Near – A Novel Mechanism for Effective and Accountable Communication of Differential Privacy through Multi-Stakeholder Research. We hope our research can facilitate the broader adoption of differential privacy!
(August 2024) My first-authored paper, titled “Understanding how to inform blind and low-vision users about data privacy through privacy question answering assistants” at the 2024 USENIX Security Symposium provides insights into blind and low-vision users’ expectations when it comes to usability, accessibility, trust and equity issues regarding digital data privacy.
(August 2024) Happy to share our paper, titled “Evaluating the usability of differential privacy tools with data practitioners?” at the 2024 USENIX SOUPS! Through a usability study on four Python-based differential privacy (DP) tools, we provide evidence-based recommendations to improve DP tools’ usability to broaden DP adoption.