Hi, I’m Sarah!

I am a 4th-year Ph.D. student in the Human-Centered Computing program at the University of Florida, and a graduate researcher as part of the Embodied Learning and Experience (ELX) Lab under Dr. Sharon Lynn Chu.

As an HCI researcher, I use my background in design to actively bridge a creative mindset and a computer scientist’s knack for analytical thinking to excel in interdisciplinary settings. Highlights of my research interests and qualifications can be found below, and more details of my work can be found on my research projects and publications pages. You can also see what I have been up to on my blog, or view a small sampling of my past artwork!

The narratives we consume and share with others are powerful things, and my dissertation work focuses on how we might use interactive digital narratives as an intervention in therapy. As a researcher, one of the primary goals of my career is to wield interactive storytelling as an agent of growth and transformation in the user, not only to support mental health, but also to foster learning and self-efficacy in the user.

I am proud of my work investigating how allowing children to create their stories through motion capture aid in their writing tasks in school, and the design of block-based programming languages to support science learning. Children, as well as instructors, have specific needs when it comes to interactive technologies, and working with them has provided me with a wealth of perspective in this area.

We gesture to share ideas with each other, but what if as we gestured, those ideas were captured and translated into meaningful visualizations to support our creative process? One of my favorite research endeavors has been investigating how to translate ideas from gesture through motion capture to support the establishment of common ground between users in creative endeavors.