About Us

What we do

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. Our focus is on the inclusive development of interventions that empower people to make positive change on personal, community, and systems levels.

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, and to use such insights to inform the design of novel systems that aim to improve targeted outcomes, and to 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 inherently interdisciplinary, integrating perspectives and techniques from both technical and humanistic fields. In these ways, we strive to make empirical, methodological, technical, and theoretical contributions.