Kathy
Cheng

I am a final year PhD candidate in Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. I am co-advised by Professor Alison Olechowski from Ready Lab and Professor Shurui Zhou from FORCOLAB. In 2025, I was a Research Scientist Intern with the HCI and Visualization group at Autodesk Research, studying GenAI assistance for 3D CAD work, working with Dr. Jo Vermeulen, Dr. Justin Matejka, and Dr. George Fitzmaurice. Previously, I received a BASc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Toronto and completed my PEY (Professional Experience Year) at Scotiabank as a Technology Consultant, where I won the PEY Co-op Student of the Year Award.

My research sits at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Mechanical Engineering. I aim to advance collaborative practices in distributed hardware design teams through the use of 3D CAD (computer-aided design) tools. We use a variety of methods (interviews, data mining, analysis of digital trace data) to uncover the challenges of collaborating with CAD and identify solutions to address these challenges — often taking inspiration from collaborative software development insights. Our past work has explored how branching and merging can facilitate concurrent work and version control in CAD, which was presented at CSCW 2023. We have also investigated collaboration practices in open-source hardware contexts to identify best practices and design implications for open-source platforms.

I am currently seeking full-time opportunities for HCI/UX research in industry!