Melissa Densmore

I am a human-computer interaction for development (HCI4D) researcher, with a specific focus on the uses of new information technology and interfaces for healthcare in Africa. Actually, I've also dabbled in solar powered lighting for hospitals in rural Nigeria and Uganda, done some IT for education in Mexico, and helped out with wireless deployments in India, so I've been known to think about other problems as well, but my primary focus (i.e. my dissertation) is on information technology for healthcare in Africa. My motivation runs something like this: (A) I'm pretty good (compared to some, not so much compared to a lot of my colleagues ) at computers and actually get pretty obsessed with them at times. (B) God has placed a special and specific compassion in my heart for the needs of Africa. Since I'm absolutely sure that (A) is not a coincidence, and because God has managed to do a lot of things in my life to make this possible, I'm using (A) to address (B).

Prior to joining UCT, I completed a post-doc in the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research in Bangalore, India. I did my PhD at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, where my dissertation committee was Dean AnnaLee Saxenian (co-chair), Prof. John Chuang (co-chair), Prof. Eric Brewer and Prof. Jenna Burrell. My work experience is in user interface and web application design, so my research also involves human-computer interaction, participatory design, and action research. By combining a theoretical approach with an experiential interaction, my work most closely approaches applied anthropology. My dissertation was primarily ethnographic - as part of my work I traveled five times to Uganda, with my main fieldwork occuring during a 15 month stay from January 2009 to the beginning of April 2010. While this work included the deployment of technology, my primary work was observation and inquiry, and my study was structured to enable me to deliberately step back from my role as a technologist, both to ensure sustainability of the deployment in my absence, but also so I would have the time to observe social dynamics as they emerged around the deployment over time.

During my stay in Uganda volunteered as a lecturer teaching Object-Oriented Programming in Java to 225+ first year students at the Mbarara University of Science and Technology Institute of Computer Science. I know this page is sort of 1995, but that's the easiest way to make lots of info available in the lowest number of bytes on the web (without compressing the text).