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 journalists’ exploration, sensemaking, and communication of large-scale scientific information. New technologies like generative AI introduce value trade-offs—accuracy versus efficiency, independence versus algorithmic support—that reshape workflows and professional identity.
Through computational techniques that operationalize news values and interactive systems that reveal how AI impacts practice, my work demonstrates that effective sensemaking systems must uphold what makes knowledge work meaningful: professional standards, public mission, and personal rewards like agency and creativity. I extend this empirical work into theory and evaluation frameworks that help designers navigate value tensions in AI systems.
You can email me at: nishal [at] u.northwestern.edu
News
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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.
It’s about to be a whirlwind summer! I will be attending CSST (hosted by Syracuse University iSchool) in May, followed by ICA in Denver in June, then HCIC in Wisconsin, and finally DIS in Portugal in July! If you’re attending any of these conferences, please do reach out, I’d love to meet up and chat about my work!
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.