CREATE Alumni

Alumni, share your updates with the CREATE Alumni Update form.

This is a work in progress. Please pardon missing information as we add alumni.

Aashaka Desai, Ph.D. 2026, Computer Science. Advised by Richard Ladner and Jennifer Mankoff. Dr. Desai’s thesis is “Bridging Language and Disability Lenses in the Design of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Communication Access Technologies.”

Mia Hoffman, Ph.D. 2026, Mechanical Engineering and a graduate certificate in Disability Studies. Advised by Heather Feldner and Katherine M. Steele. Thesis: “Mobility and Accessible Play Technologies for Young Children.” Dr. Hoffman’s work advanced understanding of how early mobility supports can promote exploration, participation, and development for children with disabilities.

Hoffman moves forward as a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar at The Ohio State University, in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences in the College of Medicine.

Hoffman was profiled by UW’s Husky 100 program as “an emerging leader in accessibility committed to expanding access to assistive technology that enables participation and play for children with disabilities.”

Jesse Martinez, Ph.D. 2026, Computer Science. Advised by James Fogarty. Thesis is titled “Supporting Technology Adoption for People with Disabilities.” In the fall, Dr. Martinez begins a postdoctoral appointment in the Computer-Enabled Abilities Laboratory (CEAL) at Columbia University.

Xia Su, Ph.D. 2026, Computer Science. Advised by Jon E. Froehlich. Thesis is titled  “Collaborative Intelligence for Indoor Space Understanding.” Dr. Su is headed to Google Cloud Platform as a software engineer.

Stacy Hsueh, CREATE postdoctoral fellow 2023–2025. Hsueh worked with Jennifer Mankoff and Anat Caspi, using critical theory to interrogate computing norms and employing design methods to explore disability-led design. She sought to understand experiences of precarity in underserved communities and to examine the role technology plays in challenging or reinforcing structural inequities.

Hsueh is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom.

Dhruv (DJ) Jain, Ph.D. 2022, Computer Science & Engineering. Advised by Jon E. Froehlich. Dr. Jain is an assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, also affiliated with the School of Information and Michigan Medicine. His research lies in human-computer interaction, with a focus on accessibility, auditory interfaces, and human-centered AI. His work addresses sound awareness for deaf and hard-of-hearing people: building AI systems that make sound and speech accessible in everyday settings.

Jazette Johnson, CREATE postdoctoral fellow 2024–2026. Johnson designs and studies technologies that promote trust, safety, and wellbeing in digital environments. She studies how communities—including disabled people, older adults with dementia, and Black and Brown communities—experience, trust, and navigate AI-powered technologies, particularly in health and social contexts.

She is currently developing AI tools to support adults with cognitive disabilities (intellectual and developmental disabilities; dementia) in understanding health information and leading community-based research focused on trust, accessibility, and ethical AI design.

Emma J. McDonnell, Ph.D. 2024, Human Centered Design and Engineering. Advised by Leah Findlater. McDonnell’s dissertation research explores how communication technology, specifically captioning, could be redesigned to encourage mixed ability groups to take a collective approach to accessibility.

After graduating, McDonnell was a National Library of Medicine Postdoctoral Fellow in Biomedical Informatics and Medical Engineering in the UW School of Medicine, where she explored how disability studies perspectives could inform the design of health-focused technologies.​ McDonnell then moved into a four-year fellowship in the Institute of Visual Computing and Human-Centered Technology, Technische Universität Wien, in Vienna, Austria.

Anant Mittal, Ph.D. 2025, Computer Science. Advised by James Fogarty. Mittal’s thesis focused on the design, implementation, and examination of systems for communication, collaboration, and coordination in complex settings, such as interactions among people with and without disabilities and patients with chronic conditions collaborating with providers for care. Mittal worked on the design and development of Jod, a videoconferencing platform to facilitate communication in mixed hearing groups.

Tamanna Motahar, CREATE postdoctoral fellow 2024–2025. Motahar is the Patrick Clark Endowed Assistant Professor in the School of Computing and Informatics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She has expressed deep gratitude to her fellow CREATE postdocs and her mentors, Maya Cakmak, Heather Feldner, and Jennifer Mankoff, for their guidance, mentorship, and support during her postdoctoral fellowship and during the job search.

Alexandra (Sasha) Portnova, CREATE postdoctoral fellow 2022–2024. Portnova’s work while at CREATE aimed to improve accessibility of commercially-available hand-tracking devices and use them as tools for remote hand rehabilitation.

In 2024, Portnova was interviewed about her experiences as a NIDILRR-funded fellow and about her work in rehabilitation research. Portnova spoke about the value of the CREATE ARRT fellowship in transitioning from the overwhelming life of a Ph.D. student into a faculty career.

After her fellowship ended, Portnova worked as a research scientist in the Neuromechanics & Mobility Lab, under the direction of CREATE associate director Katherine M. Steele. In 2025, she moved on to work at Meta.

Venkatesh Potluri, Ph.D. 2024, Computer Science & Engineering. Advised by Jennifer Mankoff. Dr. Potluri’s research has examined accessibility barriers experienced by blind or visually impaired (BVI) developers participating in user interface design, data science, and physical computing. His work has contributed real-world systems to improve developer tools and new interaction techniques to address these access barriers. Potluri is an assistant professor at the School of Information, University of Michigan.

Ather Sharif, Ph.D. 2024, Computer Science & Engineering. Advised by Jacob O. Wobbrock. After graduating, Sharif held the one-year Bonderman Fellowship. He is now a principal associate at Capital One and founder and researcher at EvoXLabs, an initiative to bridge the gap between technology and people with disabilities. Sharif was recognized by RealLIST Innovators 2025, one of 15 key AI developers and community leaders.

Bethany M. Sloane, CREATE postdoctoral fellow 2024–2025. Sloane worked with CREATE associate directors Heather Feldner and Katherine M. Steele and CREATE faculty Kim Ingraham.

Sloane, who has been working to expand power mobility options for young children with cerebral palsy and other mobility delays, received an NIH K23 Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award. The award will allow her to pursue her research for the next four years. She is now an associate professor at Oregon State University.

Anne Ross Spencer, Ph.D. 2021, Computer Science & Engineering. Advised by Jon E. Froehlich and Jacob O. Wobbrock.

After graduating, Spencer was appointed Assistant Professor at Bucknell University.

Alyssa Spomer, Ph.D. 2023, Mechanical Engineering. Advised by Katherine M. Steele. Spomer received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and TL1 Fellowship and was honored by UW’s Husky 100 program in 2020. Spomer is now a Clinical Scientist at Gillette Children’s, St. Paul.

Nicole Zaino, Ph.D. 2023, Mechanical Engineering. Advised by Katherine M. Steele and Heather Feldner. Her thesis examined how individuals use and are impacted by mobility aids.

Zaino is a research scientist in biomechanics and assistive technology at LUCI Mobility and a world-class athlete with the U.S. Paralympic Nordic team who competed in the 2026 Winter Paralympics.