Tonya Nguyen
Photo of Tonya Nguyen
san francisco, ca

✨ I’m currently on the 2026 job market for academic and industry roles! ✨

I'm a PhD candidate at the Berkeley School of Information, advised by Professor Niloufar Salehi. My research sits at the intersection of HCI, responsible AI, public interest technlogy, and social computing. My PhD focuses on how high-stakes sociotechnical systems—such as algorithmic school assignment policies used for school desegregation and the digital infrastructures of mutual aid groups—shape people’s opportunities, and on how we can better align these systems with human values (e.g., fairness, safety, reliability). Methodologically, I combine mixed-methods, controlled experiments, design research, and systems building in my work.

More broadly, my research takes an ecological view of AI and sociotechnical systems: I co-specify values with stakeholders, grounding them in complex social, organizational, and historical contexts, identify points of intervention in the institutional and technical layers where these systems are embedded, and build tools and processes that help steer model and platform behavior in diverse real-world deployments.

My research career began at UC Berkeley, where I designed and completed an interdisciplinary major in Computer Science, Interaction Design, and Critical Theory. Since then, I have worked on sociotechnical systems and responsible AI with Jenn Wortman Vaughan and Jean Garcia-Gathright at Microsoft Research (FATE/Sociotechnical Alignment Center); Michael Bernstein and Mark Whiting at Stanford HCI; and Björn Hartmann at the Berkeley Institute of Design, on projects spanning task and organizational design, human–AI collaboration, and measurement of generative AI harms.

Outside of work, I think a lot about theories of change, relationality, and the poetics/politics of diaspora. I enjoy yoga, snowboarding, logic puzzles, wandering through museums, and being outside all day whenever I can get away with it.

Publications
"Measuring Representational Harm and Erasure in Generative AI: A Stakeholder-Validated Framework for Trust and Safety Evaluation"
Tonya Nguyen, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Jean Garcia-Gathright, Alex Chouldechova, Hanna Washington, Hanna Wallach
ACM FAccT 2026 (in submission)
"Specification Failures in Algorithmic School Choice: When Mechanisms for Fairness and Equity Fail the Public Under Scarcity"
Tonya Nguyen, Serene Cheon, Liza Gak, Cathy Hu, Catherine Albiston, Niloufar Salehi
ACM FAccT 2026 (in submission)
Implications of Conversational Artificial Intelligence →
Tonya Nguyen, Niloufar Salehi
#FairArtificalIntelligence, CHI 2020
News

05/12/25 – I'm thrilled to share that I'll be relocating to New York City during the summer to join STAC: Sociotechnical Alignment Center and FATE at Microsoft Research as a PhD intern! I'll be working under the mentorship of Dr. Jennifer Wortman Vaughan and Dr. Jean Garcia-Gathright!

04/26/25 – I'll be giving a talk at CHI 2025 in Yokohama, Japan!

1/17/25 – I've advanced to candidacy! Thank you Catherine Albiston, Morgan Ames, Coye Cheshire, and Niloufar Salehi for being part of my committee.

1/14/25 – Our team from the UC Berkeley School of Information is excited to invite submissions to our Open Panel, Sociotechnical Perspectives on Public Interest Technology (#67), at the upcoming Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) Conference in Seattle from September 3-7, 2025!

11/14/24 – Presented my work at CSCW 2024!

10/17/22 – Facilitated and co-organized "Who Has an Interest in Public Interest Technology?": Critical Questions for Working with Local Governments & Impacted Communities, a workshop at CSCW 2022.

09/22/22 – Gave a talk about Democratic Engagement and Procedural Justice in Algorithmic School Assignment at Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, in Washington, DC

09/21/22 – Awarded Meta Resarch Grant for Fairness in Two-Sided Markets: "Community-centered design of school assignment mechanisms for equity"

01/01/22 – Awarded Grant from the National Science Foundation on "DASS: Legally & Locally Legitimate: Designing & Evaluating Software Systems to Advance Equal Opportunity"

01/01/21 – Earned the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy Fellowship for 2021

Making

My—non-research related—projects.

Transportation & Wearable Design
Dérivé: Shoes Your Own Adventure →
Dérivé is a dynamic mode of discovery that lights the path to an adventure. My roles in this project included protoyping, wireframing, Arduino programming, and mobile app product design.
Wearable Design for Stress Relief, Grounding Practices
Calm.io: Instant Groundification →
Calm.io is an interactive bracelet that mediates grounding practices for relaxation and bodily awareness to ground users during stressful times. My roles in this project included literature review, programming, industrial design, and prototyping.
Protest Design, Public Art Installation
Hidden Systems: Black Box Ethics →
Heuristic Algorithm is an exploration of hidden mechanisms with the visual metaphor of a black box. My roles in this project included concept generation, programming, and prototyping.