McKnight Land Grant Assistant Professor and Novus Faculty Impact Fellow in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota
Senior Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google Research
I study how AI systems in online social interactions shape mental health and how we can build them more responsibly. My work sits at the intersection of HCI, applied AI, and AI safety. I focus on high-stakes domains like destructive behaviors and crisis and longitudinal harms of AI on mental health.
My group works on two areas: (1) how social media algorithms affect mental health, and how we can improve them; and (2) LLM-powered chatbots and this user mental health, cognitive capacity, and well-being.
My work has generously been supported by the NSF CAREER Award, the National Science Foundation (NSF), Northwestern’s Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI), Cisco Research, Google, and an Amazon Research Award, and support from the McKnight Foundation and the Novus Faculty Impact Fellowship.
Recent Research (see Google Scholar and publications page for more, better updated lists)
Theorizing about practices for HCML/HCAI: [Communications of the ACM 2023 Featured Article] [FAccT 2024]
AI for Mental Health and Evaluations: [CSCW 2023] [NAACL 2024]
Moderator labor, online communities, and their impacts : [ICWSM, 2022 🏅] [ICWSM 2022] [New Media and Society 2022] [CSCW 2023] [ICWSM 2024]
Recommendations and Mental Health: [FAccTRec @ RecSys 2022] [TikTok study @ CHI 2023] [CHI 2024]
Critical lit reviews of mental health and social media: [npj digital medicine 2020] [CSCW 2019🏅] [FAccT 2023]
Video Conferencing, Bias, and Design: [CSCW 2023🏅]
News
June 2026: Major website overhaul, with better summaries, clearer explanations!
May 2026: Very grateful to receive the inaugural Novus Faculty Impact Fellowship. Thank you CSE!
April 2026: Presented our group’s papers at CHI 2026 in Barcelona! Congrats to Mo Houtti and our collaborators on our Best Paper Honorable Mention award for our work in improving virtual meeting inclusivity!
March 2026: Awarded the NSF CAREER Award, and received the McKnight Land Grant award for Assistant Professors at the University of Minnesota!
