Student Supervision
I supervise PhD and Masters students working at the intersection of human-computer interaction, software engineering, data science, and social justice. typically projects that involve both building or evaluating technical systems and engaging critically with the people and politics around them.
If you’re considering applying for a PhD or Masters project with me, check the latest news for current openings or email me at s.j.m.brooke@uva.nl to discuss ideas.
I welcome students interested in gender and technical cultures, inclusive and participatory design, platform governance, the politics of AI systems, or computational approaches to studying social and technical communities.
Strong candidates tend to be curious across disciplinary boundaries, comfortable with software development and data science methods or motivated to learn them, and drawn to research questions that have real consequences for how technology gets built and for whom.
PhD Candidates
Maria Mlocka
Digital Interactions Lab, From June 2025
Maria researches how generative AI tools shape user interface design and whose perspectives get encoded in the process. Her work uses multimodal analysis to examine how AI-driven design systems reproduce gendered and cultural assumptions through interface structure, aesthetics, and imagery — contributing to the responsible and inclusive development of generative design tools.
Ailsa Robertson
Theoretical Computer Science, From Nov 2023
Ailsa works on the Quantum Impact on Societal Security project. Her research explores the governance, trust, and security dimensions of the transition to quantum-safe cryptographic systems. She maps the complex landscape of regulators, standards bodies, implementers, and funders involved in preparing critical infrastructure for the quantum threat — identifying gaps in coordination and ownership that shape how societies navigate this transition.
Masters Students
Rachna Mallara
MSc Information Studies, 2025–26
Designing a privacy-first, offline menstrual wearable that centres diverse bodily experiences. Using feminist HCI and participatory methods, Rachna is building an open hardware prototype that collects heart rate and temperature data locally, arguing that privacy-by-design in menstrual technology is both technically feasible and ethically necessary.
Emma Bösz
MSc Information Studies, 2025–26
Investigating whether uncertainty indicators in AI chatbots can mitigate overtrust in politically sensitive contexts. Emma’s experimental study tests visual and textual cues for confidence in AI-generated responses about German migration politics.
Kaylee Wu
MSc Information Studies, 2025–26
Using participatory speculative design to explore how female-identifying students in Amsterdam imagine and reframe safety beyond surveillance-based assumptions. Kaylee’s thesis examines what new technology concepts emerge when safety is collectively questioned rather than taken as given.
Liwia Tarkowska
MSc Information Studies, 2025–26
Designing ADHD-friendly hormonal tracking technology through participatory co-design with women who have neurodiversity and menstruation-related disorders. Liwia’s work challenges the normative assumptions embedded in mainstream menstrual apps and explores more inclusive approaches to self-tracking
Technical Projects
Roberta Pošiūnaitė
MSc Software Engineering, 2025–26
Building an IDE extension for accessible task management designed around neurodivergent cognitive patterns. Roberta’s project uses participatory co-design with neurodivergent women developers to translate user needs into working software that centres cognitive diversity.
Thom Pheijffer
MSc Software Engineering, 2024–25
Built CranAI, an AI-assisted malleable interface for the CRAN package repository that makes R package discovery more flexible and accessible. The prototype combines switchable layouts, AI chat, and dynamically generated attributes so users can search, compare, and explore packages in ways the traditional static interface doesn’t support. This work led to a paper under review at UIST 2026.
Karolina Koziel
MSc Software Engineering, 2025–26
Exploring the barriers that women, gender-diverse, and neurodivergent developers face when interacting with GitHub Copilot. Karolina’s research examines how AI code assistants can be reimagined to better support the diversity of people who code.
Minne van der Poel
MSc Software Engineering, 2024–25
Building and evaluating a JupyterLab extension that introduces collapsing and code-combination features to help users manage complexity in computational notebooks. Minne’s user study compares how data science students navigate, debug, and comprehend large notebooks with and without structured navigation tools.