Sachita Nishal
PhD Candidate, Northwestern University
Hi, I’m Sachita! I recently finished my PhD at Northwestern University, where I was advised by Dr. Nick Diakopoulos. I’m tremendously excited to be joining as a postdoc at the UW Center for an Informed Public in Fall 2026, where I will be mentored by Dr. Emma Spiro and Dr. Gary Hsieh!
In my research, I design sociotechnical systems to help people navigate a complex online information ecosystem. I focus on the value-sensitive design and evaluation of sociotechnical systems, and also study how novel technologies—social platforms, ‘second-brain’ style tools, generative AI—might impact and reshape people’s sensemaking practices.
During my PhD, I designed interactive AI-infused systems to support science journalists in exploring, making sense of, and translating large-scale scientific information during newsgathering. This research surfaced latent value trade-offs and proposed 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: sachita [dot] nishal [at] gmail [dot] com
News
A long overdue job update, but I will be joining as a postdoc at the UW Center for an Informed Public in Fall 2026, where I will be mentored by Dr. Emma Spiro and Dr. Gary Hsieh. I’m really really really excited!
Something
A study I led during my internship at Microsoft Research has been accepted to CHI 2026! We worked with 20 science journalists to uncover the ways in which differnt kinds of LLM-infused sensemaking tools might impact their values, practices and hence their agency. Our work offers both design and theoretical implications that follow from this. Find the paper here, and find me in Barcelona at CHI this April!
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.