People, communities, and the technologies between them.
02
My approach
Listen closely. Co-design thoughtfully. Study the impact.
About my work
Understanding people. Building more supportive digital
spaces.
My research brings together
human–computer interaction, computational social science, and
digital health.
I explore peer support, spiritual care, and meaning-making in online
communities.
I combine interviews, co-design workshops, and surveys with natural
language processing and computational analysis to understand
people’s experiences and translate them into thoughtful design.
From understanding lived experiences to designing with
communities.
Computational social scienceDigital health
Computational Social Science of Digital Health and Supportive
Interactions
Examining how community responses relate to continued engagement
in mental health and spirituality communities on Reddit.
23,302 Reddit threads
· Approximately 194,200 comments
More about this research +
I lead a project integrating archived conversations,
theory-informed qualitative annotation, and an NLP
classification pipeline to study how people reinterpret
difficult experiences. The work combines conversation
reconstruction, human annotation protocols, and statistical
modeling.
Conversation structure · Conceptual diagram
Co-designOnline spiritual care
Online Communities for Digital Health and Supportive Care
Working with spiritual care professionals to explore how online
communities can support meaningful care, reflection, and peer
connection.
More about this research +
I led co-design workshops with 24 spiritual care professionals
and conducted interviews and qualitative analysis to inform
community governance and user experience. I also collaborated
with CaringBridge’s product and design teams on “Light a
Candle,” a feature for expressing support without words,
described in my CV as in development.
Quantitative Research on Generative AI Use in Higher Education
GenAI@Mines is a multi-wave survey of student and faculty AI use
at Colorado School of Mines.
More about this research +
I co-developed research questions, hypotheses, and QuestionPro
branching logic, and contributed to the study’s
OSF-preregistered regression plan. The project uses survey
research to examine generative AI use across the university
community.
Conceptual survey illustration
Community-centered designHuman–AI interaction
Community-Centered Reddit Bot Design
Co-designing a Reddit bot with r/compSocial to support
knowledge-sharing, topic discovery, and academic discussion.
More about this research +
Through contextual inquiry, a user survey, and two rounds of
user testing, I developed and refined keyword subscriptions,
topic notifications, and research-paper recommendations.
Moderator and community feedback guided iterative design and
evaluation.
Investigating how people’s mental models of security threats
have evolved across computers, smartphones, and connected
devices.
More about this research +
This mixed-methods replication adapts a foundational 2010
study to modern security concerns. Surveys, in-depth
interviews, and thematic analysis help uncover how people
understand risks and make everyday security decisions.
Artificial Intelligence in Spiritual Care: A Modified Delphi
Study.
Fabian Winiger, C. Estelle Smith,
Shadi Nourriz, Csaba Szilagyi, and Annette
Haussmann.
Journal of Medical Internet Research
CSCW2026
Toward the Development of Online Spiritual Care Communities: A
Large-Scale Survey of Spiritual Care Stakeholders to Establish
Initial Design Directions, Acceptability, and Feasibility.
Jesan Ahammed Ovi, Alemitu Bezabih, Anne-Marie Snider,
Shadi Nourriz, Daniel McKenzie, and C. Estelle
Smith.
ACM CSCW 2026
Honorable Mention
CHI2026
SPIRIT: A Design Framework To Support Technology Interventions
for Spiritual Care Within and Beyond the Clinic.
C. Estelle Smith, Alemitu Bezabih,
Shadi Nourriz, and Jesan Ahammed Ovi.
ACM CHI 2026
HSCC2026
“Reddit Ministry”: Conceptualizing Online Communities as Novel
Sites for Spiritual Care Delivery.
Alemitu Bezabih, Anne-Marie Snider, Jesan Ahammed Ovi,
Shadi Nourriz, George Handzo, and C. Estelle
Smith.
Health and Social Care Chaplaincy · Special Issue on Digital
Spiritual Care
CI2025
Stay Ahead: Designing a Community-Driven, AI-Powered Bot for
Predicting Academic Paper Impact and Enhancing Multi-User
Engagement.
Shadi Nourriz, Rui Zhang, and C. Estelle Smith.
Collective Intelligence 2025 · Poster and Demo Track
