Izabelle is a PhD student working in the eDAPT lab at UBC under professor Joanna McGrenere. She's completed undergrad and graduate degrees in Computer Science and HCI at both the University of McMaster and UBC. Professionally she's also worked as a web developer and test automation specialist. Working at Blackberry throughout her summers during her undergrad degree.
As she moves forward in academia Izabelle is looking forward to greater teaching and mentorship opportunities. Izabelle has been a teaching assistant (TA) for a variety of computer graphics and HCI courses at UBC, highly enjoying the teaching experience. This has led to her being appointed as the UBC Computer Science TA coordinator and to presenting tips and tricks for success at a series of UBC CS TA training events. Post-grad, she is planning to pursue similar positions, possibly moving towards a teaching track faculty position.
Research Interests
Izabelle has long been fascinated with the fundamental psychological and physical factors in how people interact with technology. She has mainly published in the CHI community, focusing for several years on human factors research. Specifically, she’s worked in both her undergrad and graduate degrees to help expand our understanding of pointing interaction, especially in VR experiences.
Since entering her PhD degree, Izabelle has expanded her research interests out to incorporate more qualitative and constructivist research. Through a series of graduate courses and talks she’s become interested in how users varying experiences and backgrounds impact their needs and perspectives. Conducting more constructivist research to understand the unique needs of, in particular, older users of mobile technology.
Of particular research interest to her is the role of interruption, notifications and personalization in our everyday lives. With the increasing ubiquity of mobile technology, we are interrupted more now than ever before. Personalization settings to reduce this are costly and limited in scope and expressiveness. Her PhD thesis seeks to address this through enhanced machine-human partnership that help users more expressively and automatically personalize their devices.