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
A study I led during my internship at Microsoft Research has been accepted to CHI 2026. We work with 20 science journalists to uncover and chart out the ways in which differnt kinds of LLM-infused sensemaking tools may impact their values, practices and hence their agency, and suggest both design and theoretical implications that follow! Find the paper here, and find me in Barcelona this April!
I am looking for tenure-track research and postdoc positions for Summer 2026 an onwards! An exciting (but also unnerving) time :)
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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.