About
I'm a Research Scientist at Walmart's Information Security team, where I lead human-centered research on security threats. My research investigates how people perceive and respond to security threats in practice, attending to the roles of technology, social context, and lived experience. I contribute to usable security, human–computer interaction, critical data studies, and sociotechnical security research.
Before joining Walmart, I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University in June, 2025, where my dissertation focused on building and demonstrating a framework for human-centered threat modeling.
I employ a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, such as including in-depth interviewing, fieldwork, contextual inquiry, surveys, and content analysis, to develop detailed accounts of how people construct threat models and to examine how security research can better center participants' lived realities. My work has been published in top-tier venues in security and privacy, and human–computer interaction, including IEEE S&P, ACM CHI, and SOUPS.
research
My work sits at the intersection of security, privacy, and human-computer interaction. Below are the core threads that run through it.
Human-Centered Threat Modeling
I study how people construct threat models in practice — how they identify, understand, and respond to threats in their lives, shaped by their relationships, identities, and lived experiences. Threat modeling has traditionally been a tool for engineers securing systems. I'm interested in what it looks like when we center the human instead: how do real people reason about who might harm them, and what does security research miss when it doesn't ask?
This matters because security systems built without understanding real human threat models tend to fail the people who need them most. When we understand how people actually perceive and navigate risk, we can design interventions, tools, and policies that fit their lives — rather than asking them to fit ours.
Security & Privacy of Marginalized Communities
Mainstream security research often overlooks communities with distinct threat landscapes. I work with immigrants, people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and other underrepresented groups to understand their real security and privacy challenges, practices, and needs.
Online Harassment & Digital Safety
I examine how harassment manifests online, how existing reporting and safety systems fail people — particularly across cultural and gender lines — and what better-designed interventions might look like.
Methods for Sociotechnical Security Research
Studying how people experience security and privacy often requires methods that don't yet fully exist. The communities I work with, and the questions I ask, frequently fall outside what standard security research methods were designed for. This pushes me toward meta-research: examining how we as a field study and work with people, how well our methods actually capture what we claim, and where our blind spots are. I'm interested in building and evaluating the methodological tools that make rigorous, human-centered security research possible in the first place.
news
Received a Distinguished Reviewer Award at USENIX Security 2026.
Our SOUPS poster on ongoing phishing research with NIST (Phish Out of Water: A Large-Scale Study of Phishing Email Cues) was accepted — stay tuned for more!
Our poster on human-centered threat modeling was accepted to SOUPS 2026.
Our paper on human-centered threat modeling was accepted to IEEE S&P 2026!
Our paper on gendered experiences of online harassment among Pakistani young adults was accepted to CHI 2026!
Joined Walmart's Information Security team as a Research Scientist, focusing on human factors in security.
Passed my dissertation defense and earned my PhD in Computer Science. 🎉