The professor who builds technology for the people it overlooks

Nicola Dell says the most interesting technology problems begin with people, not technology. She grew up in Zimbabwe and earned her PhD in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington in 2015. Her early work built camera-based phone tools for community health workers in India and Africa, a bet that smartphones would soon be cheap and powerful enough to matter far from traditional computing infrastructure.

the divide between technological innovation and making it work for real humans

Nicola Dell, NYU Tandon profile

At Cornell from 2016 her research turned to home health care and to technology-facilitated intimate partner abuse, two areas that mainstream tech design tends to skip. With collaborators she created the Clinic to End Tech Abuse at Cornell Tech. Since 2018 it has paired survivors in New York City with trained technology consultants who can examine devices and accounts for signs of abuse and help survivors make informed decisions about their safety. About 150 volunteers have taken part, 20 to 30 at a time.

That model is now moving to Sanctuary for Families, a leading New York provider of services for survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking, so the clinic can sit inside an organisation built for survivors. Dell says her next step at NYU is a coalition of tech clinics, service providers, community groups and researchers to develop and scale support for people facing tech abuse.

She calls NYU a behemoth in the city, with colleagues in social work, the medical school and computer science, and sees a chance to pair the university’s strengths in cybersecurity and privacy with research that starts from the everyday experience of communities.