About Me

Hi！I am Ruipu Hu, a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland’s College of Information (iSchool), advised by Professor Amanda Lazar at The Health Aging and Technology (THAT) Lab. I expect to receive my PhD in May 2026. My research appears or is under review at premier HCI venues including ACM CHI, CSCW, ASSETS, and UIST, and has been recognized with a Best Paper Award at CHI 2025. Prior to my PhD, I earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, where I worked with Professor Sang Won Lee to design interactive systems that facilitate empathy among users.

I am currently on the academic job market for assistant professor positions and postdoctoral opportunities. I welcome any conversations or opportunities :)

My research is in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), drawing on and contributing to CSCW, and focuses on understanding how to best design technologies for groups often overlooked in technology design. In my graduate and undergraduate training, I have largely focused on designing with older adults and people with disabilities such as those with cognitive impairments. In working with this particular group, I found an assets-based perspective especially helpful for showing the research community the strengths that people already bring to technology use.

Specifically, I draw on theories that highlight the skills of typical populations but have rarely been applied to the populations I work with, such as Goffman’s dramaturgy and distributed cognition. Similarly, I adapt methods to make them accessible to people with cognitive impairments. Doing so has informed technology design and, when more appropriate for this population, low-tech solutions such as paper manuals and low-fidelity prototypes.