Curriculum Vitae
Experience, education, and background.
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May 2026 – Present
Postdoctoral Researcher
Digital Worlds Institute, University of Florida
Leading eye-tracking research using Tobii Pro Glasses 3 to measure visual processing and attentional demands as engineers interact with semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Outcomes will inform design decisions on instructor presence and fidelity in semiconductor education. Owning the research roadmap for an LLM-based conversational tutoring system, designing a within-subjects study across three gated instructional stages and 50 participants to test whether the agent changes learning behavior. Directing a full-stack engineer (1 direct report) through end-to-end build of the research platform (React/TypeScript front end, Node/Express/PostgreSQL back end, self-hosted Llama-3.1-70B) cutting time-to-first-participant to 4 weeks.
May 2020 – May 2026
Graduate Research Assistant
Embodied Learning and Experience (ELX) Lab, University of Florida
Designed and executed an end-to-end within-subjects study (N=41) comparing two LLM-based conversational agents on motivation, perceived relevance, and learning outcomes, using inferential statistics on behavioral and survey data to identify which design changed user behavior rather than self-reported satisfaction; built on a 3-version prompt engineering pipeline tested against synthetic personas before human participants, with bias review at each iteration. Led first-authored research on emerging devices, including an augmented reality mobile assistant tested with 43 participants to measure how physical context affects attention and recall, published across 2 papers on AR/mobile learning environments. Ran field deployment of a computation-based Making curriculum reaching 421 students across 20 public school classrooms, coordinating a cross-functional team of 10 researchers across 2 institutions and partnering with teachers and administrators to execute under real-world constraints. Designed and evaluated a movie recommender system built from participants own social media histories, running 21 concept-testing sessions to measure how users respond to personalization drawn from their actual behavior.
May – Aug 2022
User Experience Research Intern
Laboratory for Analytic Sciences (LAS), North Carolina State University
Conducted in-depth interviews with 12 intelligence analysts over a 3-month engagement, recruiting and moderating with a population under access and disclosure constraints, to map how information passes between analysts during collaborative sensemaking. Synthesized primary interview data with secondary research across 3 sources into actionable findings on organizational structure and sensemaking practice, published as a peer-reviewed paper. Presented user-centered insights at the Summer Conference on Applied Data Science, informing the design of a proprietary information synthesis tool.
Nov 2017 – Feb 2018
Content Writer
CrickMate
Published daily cricket articles applying SEO best practices - keyword research, on-page optimisation, and performance monitoring - to maximise article visibility and reach.
Sep – Dec 2016
Content Writing & Digital Marketing Intern
Contributed to online marketing strategy development and demonstrated product functionality to prospective clients, supporting user acquisition growth.
Education
2021 – 2026
PhD in Human-Centered Computing
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
Dissertation: Designing and evaluating pedagogical conversational agents for personalized, interest-driven learning. Research areas: connected learning, personalized learning, mental wellbeing.
2019 – 2021
Master of Science in Computer Science
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
Relevant Coursework: Human-Computer Interaction, UX Design, Research Methods for HCC, Qualitative Research, Statistical Methods fro Research, Information Visualization, Expressive Agents, Organizational Behavior.
2015 – 2019
Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology
Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, India
Relevant Coursework: Usability Engineering, Gamification, Theory of Computation, Advanced Data Structures, Software Engineering, Distributed Operating Systems, Computer Networks.