CHCI welcomes five new faculty members

Aaron Ansell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religion and Culture. He is interested in the use of immersive technologies in higher education. Ansell is currently researching public healthcare and poor people's health-seeking activities in rural Northeast Brazil. As with all of his work, this project attends to the communicative forms that Brazilians use to negotiate resources either through traditional political brokers ("patronage") or through liberal bureaucratic procedures. Ansell examines these issues in the context of an important regime change in Brazil, the rise of the left-wing Workers' Party government (2003-present).

Brendan David-John is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. David-John was the first Native male to graduate with a doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Florida in 2022, and received his BS and MS from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2017. He is from Salamanca NY, which is located on the Allegany reservation of the Seneca Nation of Indians. 

David-John’s personal goals include increasing the representation of Native Americans in STEM and higher education, specifically in computing. He believes that accomplishing this goal comes from an introduction to STEM during secondary school, and immersion in research early during undergraduate studies.  He is a proud member of the American Indian Science & Engineering Society and has been a Sequoyah Fellow since 2013. His research interests include virtual reality and eye tracking, with a primary focus on privacy and security for the future of virtual and mixed reality.

Netta Gurari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics. She studies how humans perceive their movements and interactions with objects, with a current focus on how individuals with stroke perceive somatosensory signals at their upper limb.  Gurari leads a multi-disciplinary research team and brings a unique perspective to this research area given her formal training in and knowledge of robotics, psychophysics testing, neuropathophysiology, electrophysiology, biophysical signal processing, and clinical care.

Sol Lim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering. Her work is focused on theoretical and applied ergonomics and biomechanics, primarily relating to building systems that aid mobility and accessibility of people with diverse functional capabilities. The overall goals of her research are to: (1) assess human motion by combining functional biomechanics, wearable sensing technologies, and data analytics in a range of environmental contexts, and (2) improve human performance and well-being by providing adequate & timely intervention.

Qin Zhu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education and an Affiliate Researcher at the Colorado School of Mines.  Zhu is Editor for International Perspectives at the Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science, Associate Editor for Engineering Studies, and  Executive Committee Member of the International Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum. Zhu's research interests include global and international engineering education, engineering ethics, engineering cultures, and ethics and policy of computing technologies and robotics.