Grad Slam | University of California, Santa Barbara

Before my life as a UX Researcher, I was a Social & Behavioral Scientist, working on my PhD at UCSB. While there, I had the unique opportunity to work with an incredible research team. I had the opportunity to explore many areas of interest, such as how we communicate online, how our communication changes when we have a family member with a chronic illness, and how we can use technology to foster vitality and community. The following are three talks that I gave while competing in UCSB’s Grad Slam, an annual event bringing the campus community together to spotlight the research that is being done by graduate students.

Graduate students prepare and present a 3 minute talk about their research, with the goal of making it clear, direct, and engaging to diverse audiences. The university rewards the winners with cash prizes and the champion represents the university in a system-wide competition.

The following are my competition talks for 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Online Dating: Daters Look for Information About Partners Online (2017)

Semifinals round

Apps like Tinder, Bumble, and OKCupid have become staples of dating today. For the companies designing these apps, it could be essential to understand how their users interact with the app as well as other websites because of their app.

In this talk, I discuss how people who are using online dating services look for information after they’ve found a potential date. I also discuss some of the personal factors that people bring with them to the online dating interaction and how this impacts their feelings about online dating in general.

Communicating Resilience During Acute and Chronic Stress (2018)

Final Round

Stress is a pervasive force to be reckoned with and understanding how it affects users mental, emotional, and physical health could be key to understanding how to build better products. In this talk, I discuss how stress and resilience processes in families living with chronic illness are impacted by stress communication and also how they can communicate resilience. Further, I discuss what we know and how we know it through multiple research methodologies, including quantitative, qualitative, and physiological markers of stress.

Sharing a (Cyber)Space: Fostering Relationship Maintenance and a Sense of Community in an Assisted Living Community Through Virtual Reality (2019)

Semifinals Round

Gone are the days of virtual reality only serving a niche market of early adopters and gamers. Advancements in VR have opened up new possibilities for the technology and for those who may have a use for it. In this talk, I discuss a product test of Rendever, a small VR company created specifically for seniors. Our study examined the potential positive impact virtual reality could have on social and mental health outcomes for seniors living in residential care communities.