Speakers

Connie Chau, Mara Ulloa, Lukas Lazarek, Charles Cui

Talk Title

GEO Community Practicum: Exploring the link between public scholarship & academic research

Abstract

As researchers, many of us are often confronted with matters of impact & how our research connects with the broader world and society around us. For some, our research interests take us down a path towards community-based research methods, engaging with people's real needs, challenges, and experiences. And for others, interacting with the local communities around us can help develop our research principles or approaches and enrich our lives, even beyond scholarly pursuits. From communities of art to environmentalism to CS education to advocacy, Chicago & Evanston host a wide variety of thriving community organizations to be a part of. But how do we connect with these communities? How do we even find them? On behalf of the Center for Civic Engagement at Northwestern, we present the Graduate Engagement Opportunities (GEO) Community Practicum --a unique, credit-bearing course that enables graduate students across disciplines to connect theory & practice through a quarter-long internship with a community organization and a seminar on engaged scholarship. We share 4 CS students' experiences in the GEO program and discuss how our time in the GEO program helped to shape our research interests, public scholarship, and aspirations for the future.

Biographies

Mara and Connie are 3rd year CS and TSB students, respectively, in the NU-PATH Lab working under the mentorship of Dr. Maia Jacobs.

Mara's research interests span across the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Preventive Medicine, and AI, converging to explore the interplay between medical-ML design and personalized health tools. She is currently working with the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI) to Co-Design Patient-Facing Machine Learning for Prenatal Stress Reduction.

Connie's research applies participatory and community-based research methods to co-design technologies that support care work and provide equitable health outcomes for marginalized communities. She is currently working with a network of domestic violence nonprofit organizations in Chicago to co-design interventions for burnout and secondary trauma among their service providers.

Lukas is a CS PhD candidate whose research is understanding how and why everyone else might find value in programming. His work in this direction explores languages, domains, and tools which enable non-experts to quickly make use of computing, while simultaneously providing a rich setting to learn about and apply powerful computing ideas to practical problems.

Charles is a CS PhD candidate whose research explores the intersection of algorithms, data science, and human-computer interaction. Currently, he is interested in developing rigorous, adaptive methods to assess and understand visualization literacy.