I am interested in the human-computer interaction challenges involved in helping people comprehend, develop, and maintain software. I am particularly interested in studying how humans clarify complex ideas and instructions among themselves as inspiration for new ways of enhancing human-computer interaction in software engineering. I received an MS in computer science in 1992, then worked as a software engineer in Boulder and Denver, CO, for 15 years before returning to school at Oregon State to pursue a doctorate. I enjoy the work of software engineering, but I was motivated to move into academic research by a desire to improve the tools I was using.

My dissertation research involved studying the work practices of scientific modelers (specifically cognitive modelers: psychologists who model cognition in order to understand human behavior). My approach involves designing a tool that can capture and make explicit the changing, task-specific “evaluation abstractions” that are implicit in a modeler’s exploration of model output. The research has involved qualitative and quantitative empirical methods, language design, and implementation of an experimental tool (an Eclipse plugin implemented in Scala) to support modelers at the Air Force Research Laboratory who use the ACT-R and RML cognitive modeling languages.

I am currently working as a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University with Jim Herbsleb, learning more about how people collaborate to build and maintain scientific software.