New PhD student: Shwetha Rajaram

Professor Nebeling and the Michigan Information Interaction Lab are thrilled to announce that current MSI student, Shwetha Rajaram, has decided to join the UMSI PhD program.

Shwetha has broad interests in mixed reality interfaces, interaction techniques, and how to learn and be productive with these evolving new sets of technologies. She has been working with the lab for about a year now, most notably as part of the MRAT-Crisis project, where she helped explore how to evaluate a mixed reality experience designed for a crisis simulation and disaster response activity embedded in the SI 537 Crisis Informatics course. That work contributed to our upcoming CHI 2020 paper, MRAT: The Mixed Reality Analytics Toolkit, with Shwetha as a co-author.

Shwetha is currently also doing on an independent study project with Professor Nebeling where they are exploring how to best navigate the large design space of AR/VR experiences with a current focus on using XR for instruction and learning. This work nicely aligns with the larger U-M XR initiative housed in the Center for Academic Innovation.

We are looking forward to an exciting few years of research with Shwetha!