Blog

As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo, my work focuses on understanding the complex causes of Alzheimer's disease (AD), a devastating condition affecting millions worldwide, including over half a million Canadians. Despite significant research efforts, the exact mechanisms leading to AD remain unclear, and current treatments are ineffective.

Geneva Smith explores how Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) can be designed and evaluated to promote social change. Her interdisciplinary work bridges software engineering, game design, HCI, and media studies to create meaningful, pro-social learning experiences.

Mohsen’s research focuses on developing a 3D cancer-on-a-chip microfluidics device that replicates tumour conditions, alongside a computational framework to predict treatment outcomes.

Paula Sanchez Nunez de Villavicencio studies how trust and distrust shape our relationships with wearable technologies, especially as AI becomes integrated into everyday devices. Her interdisciplinary work bridges arts and engineering to explore reliability, privacy, and transparency in the future of human–technology interaction.

Zachary McKendrick bridges drama, technology, and human-computer interaction to explore how extended reality (XR) can enhance live performance and create more user-centered immersive experiences. His work draws on theatre practices to inform XR design, aiming to improve interaction and reduce the challenges of current VR technologies.

Bobbie's research work examines the ways that tourism can be more than simply an economic tool for Indigenous communities. She is interested in working alongside Indigenous and Tribal communities, including her own, to explore and document how tourism can be a vehicle for resurgence, or (re)connecting people to traditional culture, community, and Country (living lands, waters, and non-human kin). 

Daniel's research interests lie at the intersection of sustainable food systems, environment, and health. For his postdoctoral work, Daniel plans to investigate the impact of water security and participatory water governance on women's empowerment throughout their life course in East Africa. 

Oludoyin's research project aims to characterize the interaction between novel Stutzerimonas strains, which are predicted to possess nitrogen fixation genes, and various crop plants including corn, soybean, canola, and wheat. This characterization will assess their ability to colonize plants internally as endophytes (microorganisms like bacteria or fungi, that live within the internal tissues of plants without causing any apparent harm to the host) and confirm their capacity for nitrogen fixation, potentially reducing the need for nitrogen fertilizer application.

Emma's research seeks to understand the relationships between information, media, belief, and the social world. In her current project, she examines youth news consumption in Serbia to understand the political stakes of media literacy and how people find information in a context where distrust of official institutions is more the rule than the exception.