Sachita Nishal
PhD Candidate, Northwestern University
I am on the 2025-2026 academic job market! I'm looking for tenure-track positions and postdocs!
Hi, I’m Sachita! I’m a 5th-year PhD candidate at Northwestern University, advised by Dr. Nick Diakopoulos. My research asks: how can systems for navigating, parsing, and creating with information on the internet support people’s values and practices?
I address this question in the domain of science journalism, where I design interactive AI-infused systems to support how journalists explore, make sense of, and translate large-scale scientific information during news production. New technologies like generative AI introduce value trade-offs—accuracy versus efficiency, independence versus algorithmic support—that reshape workflows and professional identity. My research surfaces such value trade-offs and proposes design patterns to help journalists navigate these more thoughtfully and intentionally, in the interest of accurate, timely, useful science communication.
You can email me at: nishal [at] u.northwestern.edu
News
I am looking for tenure-track research and postdoc positions for Summer 2026 an onwards! An exciting (but also unnerving) time :)
Are you a science journalist? Interested in exploring the newsworthy research, along with who has covered it in the news and how? Excited to find new stories? We invite you to participate in our new study! Sign up here!
Our paper on value-sensitive design for journalism has been accepted to the ACM DIS 2025 conference, and also won a Best Paper Honorable Mention award! The paper explores how we can design sociotechnical systems for journalism that support journalists’ values, and has some fun discussion of the value tensions and trade-offs that arise in the design process.
Recent Blog Posts
Learning to scope (and also breathe) —
Some idle thoughts in the aftermath of my prospectus defense
One way news practitioners can think about uncertainty in LLM outputs —
Recent write-up on LLMs and uncertainty for the GAIN blog
A prototype newsgathering tool for science journalists —
A recent write-up about work presented at C+J 2024.