Student Highlight: Gala Lucía González Barrios

Gala Lucía González Barrios is a transnational electronic artist and researcher from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She serves as the director of Intercambios Transorgánicos, a research project affiliated with Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero in Argentina. She's enrolled in the iPHD program in Human Centered Design at Virginia Tech. Her chair advisor is Ico Bukvic.

Gala's work focuses on developing health-related technologies from a transdisciplinary approach and through the economist Mariana Mazucatto's work on national innovation systems worldwide, thinking of government as a fundamental player in technology development. Her current research focuses on the human voice and speech restoration for individuals experiencing significant voice transformations, such as those undergoing laryngectomy, gender transition, and other related cases. She aims to assess identity restoration and empowerment using AI-generated voices and interactive systems enabling individuals to engage in singing. 

Gala emphasized the vital role of HCI in her interdisciplinary work, highlighting its historical roots and contemporary significance in addressing complex global challenges: "HCI is an intrinsic part of my interdisciplinary work. Applying its theories and methodologies enables me to equip my proposals with a robust structure to support and enhance the iterative process. I view HCI as a contemporary toolkit rooted in the cybernetic communities of the 1960s when many of the systemic approaches we now use to understand human interactions with computer systems were first being developed. Even then, the serendipitous collaborations among scientists, engineers, and artists led to some of the most complex and innovative proposals. The importance was not placed on individual disciplines but on how they could collaboratively design correlations among themselves and create intended outcomes, mixing computational development with social sciences in a way that had no precedents. This ability to navigate complexity with clarity is fascinating and crucial for understanding the world today. It's key to devising systemic proposals to tackle humanity's most pressing challenges."