The Empower Lab is a team of students and scientists working together on research in the domains of human-computer interaction, user interface design, personal informatics, and social computing. A key focus is on the inclusive development of interventions that promote individual-, community-, and systems-level change through an empowerment approach.

Our research style blends creativity and provocative critique, while emphasizing the practical application and translational implementation of novel innovations. Our primary scope is health equity (e.g., by creating health monitoring devices, digital therapeutics, and behavior change technologies), though we also do research to build more accessible online platforms for STEM education as well as more intuitive sustainability tools for product designers.

Specifically, we undertake projects that aim to:

• increase our fundamental scientific understanding about human behaviors and lived experiences with respect to a given domain of interest
• use such insights to inform the design of novel systems that aim to improve targeted outcomes
• build and deploy these tools to study the impact in real-world settings and scenarios

This iterative, “full stack” strategy enhances our ability to assess the merit, feasibility, and efficacy of an envisioned system, while foregrounding a deep empathy for the role of technology in a given context. This also means our research is inherentlyinterdisciplinary, integrating perspectives and techniques from both technical and humanistic fields. In these ways, we strive to make empirical, methodological, technical, and theoretical contributions.

Our Projects page provides more details and examples of our work to develop and critique interactive technologies!