Caitlyn Chen

Caitlyn is a current PhD student in Emerging Media Studies (EMS). She combines her imagination and social science literacy to build a scholarly repository exploring human-machine relationships, sensor-mediated communication, and STS (science, technology & society). Her current research examines attitudes, behaviors, and societal implications related to self-tracking, virtual reality (VR), and social robots.

Research, for Caitlyn, is a path of self-evolution. She seeks to establish a systematic and visionary intellectual territory within social and behavioral sciences by integrating insights not only from psychology and sociology but also from biology and economics.

As a student researcher for a Meta grant, she co-authored papers on users’ bodily experiences and privacy perceptions in VR by using mixed methods. They presented findings at the 2024 Meaningful XR conference at Stanford University. She also contributes to industrial reports for Meta.

She has published poems and English-Chinese translation works in Chinese literary magazines. Caitlyn’s background in literature and language enriches her ability to observe, comprehend, and empathize with the nuances of “social things.” Her diverse experiences in fashion, marketing agencies, online education, government, and banking ultimately led her to academia, fulfilling her “formalized curiosity” (Zora Neale Hurston, 1942) about the world.