Currently, I'm a Design Research Specialist at Age of Learning leading iterative product design research on ABCmouse, an educational gaming platform used by over 10 million children ages 2 - 8. I've also recently worked on Adventure Academy, an MMOG for children ages 8 - 13, and Ask ABC, an AI-powered conversational feature.
I am passionate about impactful research and hold a strong mixed methods skillset, with experience in both generative and evaluative methods like participatory design, usability testing, survey creation + analysis, sentiment analysis, and of course.... the classic user interview. I have tackled working with international products and excel at triangulating the real story behind a/b test mysteries. My personal research interests center around big questions surrounding the emergence of AI and it's impact on educational technology.
I hold a M.S. in Human Centered Design and Engineering from the University of Washington and a B.S. in Social Psychology from U.C. San Diego.
Design Research
Casey Lee Hunt, Kaiwen Sun, Zahra Dhuliawala, Fumi Tsukiyama, Iva Matkovic, Zachary Schwemler, Anastasia Wolf, Zihao Zhang, Allison Druin, Amanda Huynh, Daniel Leithinger, and Jason Yip. (2023). Designing Together, Miles Apart: A Longitudinal Tabletop Telepresence Adventure in Online Co-Design with Children. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 52–67. https://doi.org/10.1145/3585088.3589359
Toxtli, C., Lucas, A., Mondal E., Ustalov, D., & Savage, S.. Uniting the Invisible Global Workers Behind Our AI Industry, submitted to CSCW'21 Workshop: The Global Labours of AI and Data Intensive Systems. Link to Video.
Medical Research
Vitorino, S., Lucas, A., Taka, T., Crotty Alexander, L.E., & Breen, E.C. (2019). E-cigarette exposed female mice exhibit a greater decrement in exercise tolerance than male mice, presented at American Thoracic Society 2019 International Conference. DOI: 10.1164/ajrccm-conference.2019.199.1_MeetingAbstracts.A4184
Mesarwi, O., Wegbrans Giró, P., Lucas, A., Moya Cespedes, E., Powell, F., Breen, E., & Malhotra, A. (2019). Chronic intermittent hypoxia causes hepatic mitochondrial dysfunction in a mouse model of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, presented at American Thoracic Society 2019 International Conference. DOI: 10.1164/ajrccmconference.2019.199.1_MeetingAbstracts.A4456
Abbasi, A., Vitorino, S.A., Reza Mohammadi, M., Lucas, A., Indralingam, C., Zhao, W., Breen, E.C., & Rossiter, H.B.(2019). Exercise normalizes alveolar exosomes in smoke-exposed mice. European Respiratory Journal, 54: PA1639. DOI:10.1183/13993003.congress-2019.PA