Zhaoyuan "Nick" Su

Hi, my name is Zhaoyuan “Nick” Su

I am a final year PhD Candidate in Informatics at the University of California Irvine. I am advised by Dr. Yunan Chen in the Health and Information Lab.

I am on the job market this year (2024-25). Please feel free to contact me regarding any relevant opportunities or to learn more about my skills and experience!

Trained in architecture, I now work as a designer and researcher, studying the interactions of human, data, and technology in health contexts. My work adopts socio-technical and socio-ecological perspectives to understand how emotion, value, and aesthetics shape interactivity and vice versa. I am particularly interested in exploring new ways of thinking about and designing interactions in different spaces and places informed by a deep understanding of human behavior, social processes, local socio-cultural contexts, and current technological practices.

I mainly publish in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Health Informatics; however, I take an interdisciplinary approach and am informed by literature in and philosophy of sociology, psychology, and particularly architecture. My work has been published in ACM CHI, CSCW, Interaction Design and Children, Foundations and Trends® in Human-Computer Interaction, MIT Press, Journal of American Medical Informatics, and American Medical Informatics Annual Symposium.

With the support of my amazing transdisciplinary collaborators, students, and mentors from computer science, law, clinical psychology, education, medicine, biology and genetics, I have earned multiple awards at top-tier HCI and health venues. These include ACM CHI 2024 (Best Paper Honorable Mention, top 5%), AMIA 2023 (Best Student Paper – Finalist, top 8 submissions), and JAMIA 2021 (Editor’s Choice). Additionally, I was recognized as a finalist (top 2%) for the Meta PhD Fellowship. Prior to that, my architectural work was recognized as a finalist for the Earl Prize in Design and by AIAS + Walt Disney Imagineering.

Education and Employment

2025 Ph.D. in Informatics, University of California, Irvine

_{^{Thesis Committee: Yunan Chen (chair), Kai Zheng, Daniel A. Epstein, Katie Salen Tekinbaş}}

2019 B.S. in Architecture + Informatics minor, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

^{_{Research mentor: Karrie Karahalios}}

2024 Research Internship @ Microsoft Research – Health Futures

_{^{Foundational and design research supporting data workers and researchers to accelerate biomedical discovery}}

2022 UX Research Internship @ Meta

_{^{Foundational and evaluative research on an enterprise productivity tool that facilitates routine task automation}}

2021 User Research Internship @ Intuitive Surgical

_{^{Desk and field research supporting the training and onboarding of surgical teams for the da Vinci robotic-assisted surgical system}}

Active Research Themes

*^{_{indicates lead author on a publication}}

_{My work spans a few health contexts, ranging from physical activity, mental well-being, asthma, to cystic fibrosis, a life-limiting progressive genetic disorder. I focus on how health management, delivery, and discovery increasingly interface with data and data-driven technologies.}

_{My PhD dissertation focuses specifically on cystic fibrosis, where I investigate the interactions of genetic disorders, emerging technologies, and societal narratives. Over the years, I used qualitative, interpretive, and design-based methodologies to engage with patients, caregivers, medical professionals, as well as data workers and researchers at the forefront of accelerating biomedical discovery to transform our understanding of genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis. My dissertation work engages with interdisciplinary scholarship, unpacks children’s and parents’ values and lived experiences in creating safe places while living with a complex genetic disorder, examines the presence of health-related and unintended stigmas associated with support systems across different ecological layers, and explores design spaces while understanding the role of data-driven technology in assisting both the everyday management and biomedical discovery aspects of genetic disorders. Here, I summarize my active research into three themes:}

Health Stigma and Human-computer Interaction

*_{ACM CSCW 2024 – encountering and managing stigma in children with severe asthma and cystic fibrosis}

Understanding and Designing Data-driven Technologies to Support Children’s Health

*_{Foundations and Trends in HCI 2024 – a systematic review of data-driven tech for children’s health}
*_{ACM CHI 2024 – the role of child development and patient values in managing children with cystic fibrosis}
*_{AMIA 2023 – a review of commercial mHealth applications for children}
*_{ACM IDC 2023 doctoral consortium – children and health data literacy}
*_{ACM CHI 2021 – wearables for children’s physical activity}

Health AI and Society

_{ACM CHI 2024 – LGBTQ+ people’s experiences with large language model-based chatbot for mental wellbeing}
_{AMIA 2023 – challenges and benefits of large language model-based chatbot for mental wellbeing}
*_{ACM CSCW 2022 – healthcare providers’ data work and imaginaires of asthma care}
*_{AMIA 2020 – healthcare consumers’ experiences with AI in mobile health applications}