My Research Statement

Death is a core part of our human experience. Unfortunately, mortality is often overlooked in the design, development, and deployment of technology. Although important strides have been made recently, much is still unknown about dying, bereaved and/or grieving user needs and how to address them within our technology platform design. 

My research engages the intersection between death, grief, technology design, and investigating how online platforms might better embed values of empathy to sustain holistic systems of support for their users. Specifically, my goal is to create actionable design recommendations for social media platforms to better support dying, grieving, or otherwise bereaved users. The current portion of this work is fundamentally qualitative, utilizing ethnography, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups to identify user needs and begin to identify design solutions. The future trajectory of this work is technically oriented, creating resources for users to better understand their options in regards to online social platforms and offering specific design solutions for social media platforms to consider in their end-to-end product development.  

I enter this research space as a former minister and hospital chaplain. During my tenure serving Memorial Sloane Kettering Cancer in a chaplain capacity, I personally witnessed cancer patients and their families grapple with navigating their options for support. From bedside, I sat with many terminal patients who were uncertain about their options for the deletion or memorialization of their social media platforms and other online data or accounts. 

My work hopes to fill some of the research gaps within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field while also contributing to important breakthroughs in industry design. 

My research is interdisciplinary in nature, blending methods and contributions from the medical, social work, and computer science domains. By combining the wisdom of these disciplines along with HCI my research strives to identify holistic solutions and move away from a siloed approach to data collection and design.