Hi, I'm Akanksha.

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I recently graduated from Lehigh University with an honors dual degree in Industrial & Systems Engineering and Financial Engineering, through the Integrated Business & Engineering program. I'm an international student from Mumbai, India.

In Fall 2026, I'm starting as a Ph.D. student in Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine.

Curiosity has led me into some interesting rooms: elementary schools in Kazakhstan, accessibility research with blind and low-vision users, and classrooms in India navigating hybrid learning.Each project comes with its own users, its own language, its own idea of what "useful" means. I've learned that the part I enjoy most is walking into a new room and figuring out what actually matters to the people in it.

That's meant working across both qualitative and quantitative methods — I've done research at Lehigh's Data, Algorithms and Society Lab, on the Save Tuba sustainability app, and as a Ruhr Fellow at the Technical University of Dortmund.

Outside of research, I enjoy working out, exploring new coffee joints, and upcycling old clothes into new pieces.