I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information (iSchool) within the School of Computing at the University of Texas at Austin, with affiliations with the Center for Research to Community Impact and the Texas Center for Disability Studies. I also serve as a faculty cadre member in the National Disability Center for Student Success. I direct the Human-centered AI for Learning and access Outcomes (HALO) Lab. I earned my Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Clemson University, and my B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Rowan University.

My work sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction, human-AI interaction, accessibility, and the learning sciences. My research is driven by a simple belief: education should be obtainable and accessible for everyone. Today, a persistent gap separates people with and without disabilities, and separates younger learners from older adults, in who gets to benefit fully from new educational technologies. I'm passionate about closing that gap and about treating learning as a lifelong journey rather than something within traditional classrooms. I believe AI, designed and built responsibly, can play a critical role in reshaping what that journey looks like for everyone.

In my lab, my students and I partner directly with the people our technologies are meant to serve — students with disabilities, older adults, and the educators who support them — using participatory and co-design methods to build AI-driven tools that are accessible from the ground up, emphasizing an “accessibility first” approach. Our research spans two connected threads: making education more accessible for learners with disabilities across the full arc of lifelong learning, from K-16 classrooms to continued learning well beyond them, and making AI technology itself more ethical, trustworthy, and adoptable for the populations who stand to benefit most from it.