Meet Emily Tseng, HCDE's newest faculty member

Dr. Emily Tseng joined the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering in Spring 2026 as an assistant professor. Her research in digital safety examines how technology mediates real-world harms, how those harms can be addressed, and what it means to intervene responsibly.

Before joining HCDE, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Microsoft Research, where she contributed to research on psychosocial uses of AI. This fall, she'll teach a new HCDE master's course on designing and engineering trust and safety, while launching the Sociotechnical Safety Lab.

We sat down with Professor Tseng to learn more about the path that brought her to HCDE, the research questions she’s exploring, and what she's looking forward to at UW.

Tell us about your background and what brought you to HCDE?

I've always been pulled toward science and technology, and the role of science in constructing better worlds, but I've also always loved talking with people, and writing and telling stories. My parents are engineers and scientists, so I was fortunate to grow up with computers handy, making little HTML pages on Neopets and random objects on CAD software, and doing little experiments around our kitchen and backyard. I was also a voracious reader, and eventually a news nerd — I spent one memorable summer interning at my local NPR affiliate as a reporter-producer. I wanted to find a career where I could pursue my interests in science and math, but also help people, and specifically help the underserved — “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”, as the journalist’s credo goes. In college at Princeton, I managed to do all of these things — I took pre-med courses, did research in epidemiology applying computational models to public health interventions, and ran my student newspaper. When I graduated in 2014, it felt like peak optimism for the tech industry. There was this idea that if you were an idealistic young person, you could build technology that genuinely made the world better.

So my first job was at a startup in Philadelphia developing decentralized diagnostic technology with the goal of expanding access to PCR testing. Looking back, I joke that startups are really good at demystifying what it takes to build a company. They puncture a lot of the Silicon Valley founder myths. At 11 a.m., I might be boxing packages and biking them to UPS, and at 2 p.m., I might be pitching our technology to a major multinational consulting firm. You really do every job.

That experience prepared me well for research. It gave me a "make something out of nothing" mentality, an appreciation that every part of the process is worth getting right, and an orientation to action, experimentation, iteration, and trying things out.

After that, I worked in health care consulting and taught at a coding boot camp. Eventually, I realized that the math and data fundamentals I’d drilled in undergrad were evolving into this thing called machine learning. So I went to Cornell Tech planning to earn a master's degree, and caught just the edge of the deep learning revolution. That's also where I discovered human-computer interaction. I remember thinking, we didn't have this in undergrad. It brought together all the things I'd been trying to combine — working closely with people, building technology, and thinking about what those technologies actually do in the world. I thought, "This is amazing." So I stayed for a PhD.

That eventually led me to HCDE, which felt like a natural fit because it's a place where those different interests come together.

What questions are driving your research right now?

My work sits in a field called digital safety. For my PhD, I studied how personal technologies can make domestic violence worse. Abuse isn't new, but technologies like location sharing, smart home devices, and connected accounts have created entirely new ways for abusers to exert control. Intimate partner violence is deeply painful for the people who experience it, but it’s also a really interesting case for computer security and privacy. An intimate partner as the adversary subverts how computer security and privacy has traditionally thought of protecting systems — you have to rethink every assumption behind authentication, fraud detection, even user-facing privacy settings.

Intimate partner violence also subverts how security and privacy has thought of its space for intervention. My PhD work centered on an approach called clinical computer security, in which we trained technologists to meet directly with survivors and help them protect themselves. This kind of approach is a really nice complement to technical and policy solutions. It’s a sociotechnical approach to a sociotechnical harm. I’m excited to expand this further as a professor here at HCDE.

What I like about this work is that we look at the whole cycle. We study how technology is affecting people's lives, work with communities to develop solutions, and then ask how the research and engineering process itself can better support the people most affected and give them more agency.

More recently, I've become really curious about the kinds of questions people are bringing to general-purpose AI — the gray-area use cases in people's personal, relational, and social lives where there’s no clear answer for a human or a machine.

One of my recent projects looked at people using chatbots for relationship advice. A paper I had published at the CHI 2026 conference is Chat, Should I Leave Him? It started with the observation that people are bringing deeply personal questions to AI in much the same way they might bring them to a close friend.

Sometimes that can help people process a situation or rehearse a difficult conversation. Other times, it's much less clear what a chatbot, or even another person, should do. I'm interested in understanding what people are actually getting from those interactions and how we can design better ways to support them.

That approach — trying to enable the benefits that people get out of a technology, despite the hype and despite whatever safety tradeoffs the technology might create — is also what I’m bringing to another project I’m excited about, working with journalists to figure out how they might want to use AI. We’re working with reporter-producers from the local Seattle public radio station KUOW to unpack what they want AI to do for them, and what guardrails make sense. One question this is setting up for us is how to do a pragmatic risk analysis that balances a user’s lived-experience expertise with expert knowledge in technology safety.

What made HCDE the right place for you?

HCDE has had an incredible reputation within HCI for a long time. One thing that really appealed to me is that the department doesn't separate engineering from understanding people. I sometimes describe it as the "full stack" — engineering, a deep understanding of people, organizations, entrepreneurship, and technology adoption. HCDE is one of the few places where all of those conversations happen together.

Before I came, everyone told me, "The people are exactly as kind as you've heard." And that has turned out to be completely true. I've already had conversations with so many faculty members about overlapping interests. Some are working on trauma-informed design. Others are thinking about AI and the agency of designers. Everywhere I turn, I find another opportunity to collaborate.

I've also been struck by how intentional the department is about supporting junior faculty. People have been incredibly generous with their time, and that has made a huge difference.

What do you hope students take away from your classes?

This fall I'll be teaching a master's-level course on Designing and Engineering Trust and Safety, and in the spring I taught a PhD-level research seminar in digital safety. In the future I'll also be teaching in the undergraduate program.

What I'm most excited to bring to my classes is helping students think about safety decisions and the role technologists play in making them. I hope they leave with a designerly approach to safety that they'll carry with them, no matter where their careers take them.

AI is the technology everyone is talking about today, but these ideas aren't tied to a single technology. I hope students leave thinking about how to center safety in whatever they're building next.

Outside of research, what do you want to share with the HCDE community?

I'm a big sports fan, so one of the things I'm excited about is experiencing Seattle's sports culture, especially the Storm.

I also love playing soccer, so if anyone knows of a good pickup group for adults, let me know!