I research what "age-appropriate" AI means when young people get to define it and how governance frameworks designed to protect youth can be shaped by their perspectives.

I'm a doctoral candidate in Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Dr. Rachel Magee and working with Dr. Madelyn Sanfilippo. I am also affiliated with Dr. Anita Chan's Community Data Clinic. My dissertation, Seen, Not Surveilled, uses a mixed-method, multi-phase study to understand how youth navigate the tension between care and control in determining what age-appropriate AI looks like. My research draws on AI ethics, critical data studies, critical youth studies, and participatory design. More broadly, I'm interested in how design, policy, and research work together to shape accountability systems that actually work for the people they claim to protect and what that collaboration looks like in practice.

I've worked with young people ages 5 to 18, across countries, in schools and community spaces, and with neurodivergent youth. The through line across these projects is a belief in young people's capacity for meaningful critique of the technologies shaping their lives, and a commitment to building modalities that let them exercise it. On the applied side, as a privacy analyst in the Office of the CIO at UIUC, I contributed to over 20 privacy impact assessments of vendors and services used campus-wide and for research, using NIST, FERPA, HIPAA, and GDPR frameworks; work that gave me a practitioner's understanding of where accountability holds and where it's performative. You can explore more of my work here.

I hold design degrees from the University of Michigan and the National Institute of Design in India, and worked in product development for manufacturing before academia. My practice is integrative by nature. Design trained me to make implicit assumptions visible; research gave me the empirical rigor to test them; compliance showed me where they play out in institutions. Alongside my research, I maintain an illustration practice; I sketch-note panels at conferences and draw about human engagements with technology.

You can find my resume here.