Current Members

Steve Oney

Steve Oney is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and Computer Science and Engineering (by courtesy). His research focuses on enabling and encouraging more people to write and customize computer programs by creating new programming tools and exploring usability issues in programming environments. Steve completed his Ph.D in Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute where he was advised by Professor Brad Myers and Dr. Joel Brandt. He also attended MIT (CS & math S.B. in 2007, CS M.Eng in 2008).

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Maryam Arab

Dr. Maryam Arab is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Information, working with Dr. Steve Oney. Dr. Maryam Arab earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University, with Dr. Thomas D. LaToza in the DevX lab. She is passionate about Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and specializes in designing programming tools that harmonize machine and human intelligence. Her research investigates how human-computer interaction would be effective in designing programming tools and how to blend machine and human intelligence.

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Ashley Zhang

Ashley is a PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information, advised by Steve Oney. She is generally interested in designing interactive systems to scale instruction and learning in programming education. Currently, she is working around tools to make students' code understandable at scale for programming instructors. Ashley received her B.S. in Computer Science from Peking University in July, 2021.

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Jiacheng Zhang

Jiacheng Zhang is a first-year PhD student advised by Professor Steve Oney. Before that, she earned her Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor's in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research interest lies in Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

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Ph.D. Alumni

Yan Chen

Dr. Yan Chen is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. Yan earned his PhD at the University of Michigan, advised by Dr. Steve Oney. After his Ph.D., he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto, working with Tovi Grossman. His research aims to leverage human computation and machine intelligence to effectively solve complex tasks that require domain expertise, such as software development, video curation. He studies problems that users face with existing tools and methods, and builds computational systems to assist users via efficient collaboration and hybrid crowd-machine workflows.

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Rebecca Krosnick

Dr. Krosnick is a software engineer at Postman Labs. She earned her PhD from the EECS department at the University of Michigan, advised by Professor Steve Oney. She is generally interested in designing end-user programming systems. She currently is exploring ways to make creating and editing web macros more intuitive and visual, and less script-heavy. She has also designed programming-by-demonstration systems for creating responsive and interactive user interfaces. Previously she worked as a software engineer at MathWorks. Rebecca received her SB and MEng in Computer Science from MIT, where she was advised by Professor Rob Miller.

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Mauli Pandey

Dr. Mauli Pandey is a UX Researcher at Google. She completed her PhD candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information, where she was advised by Steve Oney. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Accessibility, and Programming. She is interested in lowering the barriers to programming and education for people with visual impairments by understanding their experiences through qualitative research methods. Before starting her PhD, Mauli was in the MS program (2018) at the University of Michigan School of Information. During her MS, she also worked closely with Matthew Kay, Michael Nebeling, and Sun Young Park. For her undergraduate studies, she attended the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (Design and Electronics, 2014), and was advised by Pradeep Yammiyavar.

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April Wang

Dr. April Wang is an Assistant Professor at ETH Zürich in the Department of Computer Science. She completed her Ph.D. at the School of Information at the University of Michigan, advised by Professor Steve Oney and Professor Christopher Brooks. Her work aims to understand different collaboration needs and challenges around data science, and design better programming tools to support collaborative data science. April received her B.Eng. in Computer Science from Zhejiang University and M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University, where her Masters thesis investigated non-programmers learning computational literacy.

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Lei Zhang

Lei is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Princeton University and will begin as an Assistant Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2025. Lei earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan School of Information, advised by Professor Steve Oney and Professor Anhong Guo. His research in human-computer interaction focuses on building authoring tools that enable end-users to craft immersive experiences, such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). By developing interactive systems, his work explores techniques that leverage computation and interaction to empower people's creativity, collaboration, and communication in the context of content creation. He holds a BE in Software Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In his leisure time, Lei is into music production, skateboards, and 35mm film photography.

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Other Collaborators (Undergraduate and Master's)

Join Us

We are always excited to work with motivated and talented students.

Ph.D.: Please read our group's guide for Ph.D. applicants

Masters, Bachelors, and High School students: If you are interested in collaborating with our research group, please fill out this form. When you do, it will email the current members of the team so that we can see if there are any potentially matching projects. If you are unable to fill out that form for any reason, please reach out to soney@umich.edu.