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Biography:

Andrea is passionate about learning assistive technologies that move us to think differently. She develops and creates learning technologies that improve the learning of technical concepts in industry settings. Having experienced societal push-back as a Hispanic female when she first entered in Computer Science, she strives to make computing and technology concepts accessible to everyone, especially previously overlooked populations. To accomplish this, she studies the concepts of motivation, tokenization of knowledge, niche knowledge, language, and assistive technologies. She is also interested in exploring the application of these concepts in law and business, with such concepts as intellectual property and technical training in the tech industry. She is taking a gap year to pursue a Software Development, R&D position at VMware in Palo Alto, California, where she’ll be helping create a new line of digital workspaces that address the need for a new mode-of-work post-COVID. Afterwards, she is continuing her work towards a Ph.D in Computer Science and Cognitive Science. She continues to be inspired by the beliefs that learning changes lives, that mindsets have a powerful way of changing conditions, and that much of what we previously considered nature is actually learnable.

Research: 

Her research interests include computer science, cognitive science, assistive technologies, human memory and learning, assistive tools, human performance optimization, automation, software development, and brain-machine interfaces.

Research Faculty Mentors:

• , Assistant Professor, Computer Science, Colorado State University
• Laura Devendorf, Assistant Professor, ATLAS Institute
• Debanjan Mukherjee, Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Andrea's McNair Scholars mentor was Annalisa Ugarte.