Announcing Our Spring 2025 DE & Certificate Cohort

We are thrilled to welcome this Spring's cohort—an amazing group of interdisciplinary scholars from Film and Media, Information Science, Spanish and Portuguese, Environmental Design, Art Practice, Engineering, and Landscape Architecture!

Designated Emphasis

Ziwei Chen

Ziwei Chen is a Ph.D. student in Film and Media Studies at UC Berkeley. His research broadly focuses on media infrastructure studies, comparative media historiography, and urban studies, with a particular focus on the East Asian context. With a background in Computer Science and Media Studies, he is currently interested in exploring the intersection of media and technology studies, particularly the entanglement between media technologies and urbanism in China and elsewhere.

Connie Gu

Connie Gu is a Ph.D student at the UC Berkeley School of Information. As a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher, she explores the intersection of well-being, learning, and technology. Her focus extends to social computing, embodied learning, tangible user interfaces, and social psychology.

Chloé Mauvais

Chloé Mauvais is a Ph.D. student in UC Berkeley's Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She is passionate about the intersection of culture and politics, especially in Spanish-speaking countries. Chloe has contributed to research ranging from civil conflict in 1980s Peru to migratory turmoil at the southwest U.S. border.

Graduate Certificate

Ada Fang

Ada Fang is a Master of Architecture student. Her research focuses on the evolving role of architectural design in the context of rapidly iterating technologies, based on the theoretical in the new media realm. She has worked across multiple disciplines, including architecture, urban design, and the game industry, exploring how spatial design can bridge physical and virtual environments. As a curiosity-driven person, she is also one of the volunteers in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. Visit Ada's website for more information.

Roopa Ramanujam

Roopa is a Master of Design student critically exploring new media and human-computer interaction through the intersection of design, art, and technology. Her practice focuses on the thoughtful application of emerging technologies, empathy-driven experience design, and play. Roopa's previous projects include Reduce, Reuse, and Regrow, a discarded plastic dartboard repurposed into a smart microgreens planter, and The Anti-Mirror, an interactive tile grid of mirrors. Before pursuing design, Roopa studied computer science at Princeton and worked as a software engineer for several years. Visit Roopa's website for more information.

Jiawen Chen

Jiawen Chen is an interdisciplinary designer exploring the intersection of the virtual and the physical. With a background in landscape architecture and design engineering, her work is rooted in spatial experience and investigates how technology can expand the boundaries of human-machine-environment interactions. Spanning environmental design, experience design, and product strategy, her projects have received international recognition and have been exhibited at institutions such as the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Visit Jiawen's website for more information.

Binzhu Han

Binzhu is a Master of Architecture student exploring the intersection of architecture, media, and perception. With a background in architecture from Tongji University and experience at ZIWU Gallery and UN-Habitat, she investigates how space is not only built but communicated, interpreted, and reimagined through media. Her academic work combines digital design theory, computational tools, and architectural history to examine how emerging technologies transform the way we engage with built environments

Swaleha Masude

Swaleha is a Master of Fine Arts student and interdisciplinary visual artist whose work delves into the moments that reveal the essence of our existence as individuals in relation to the world, with a focus on the experiences of Muslim women in the West. Currently, she is working on a series of digitally collaged and illustrated woven tapestries that explore rituals of protection and safety in Islamic culture. She intends to record South-Asian traditional mythologies—specifically stories from Punjab—in a way that authentically preserves their vibrancy and ensures that generations to come will be able to engage with and access them.

Yidan Tang

Yidan is a Master of Architecture student seeking to explore the intersection of spatial design, interactive technology, and digital storytelling to create dynamic and immersive experiences. Her undergraduate projects included Arduino-powered installations and visualization experiments that reimagined spatial perception. Professionally, Yidan has contributed to a multimedia exhibition in a historical Chinese ancestral hall, using projection mapping and interactive displays to bridge cultural heritage with contemporary design.

Liuliu Yao

Liuliu is a Master of Landscape Architecture student interested in public space as a profound medium for social engagement and ecological balance. She envisions a public space where individuals have the right to assemble, express, and be heard. Liuliu aspires to create a digital memorial for the victims of COVID-19 in China, where memories persist despite censorship, loss is acknowledged, and collective grief transforms into resilience.

Nile Tan

Nile Tan is a filmmaker, designer, and storyteller exploring the fluid boundaries between cinema, emerging technology, and speculative media. Rooted in a deep sensitivity to visual language and critical theory, his work moves between film, installation, and hybrid media, pushing storytelling beyond the screen into interactive and participatory spaces.

Undergraduate Certificate

Siraaj Al-Din Singh

Siraaj is an undergraduate Film and Media student, music producer, composer, and songwriter. His experience with communities in eSports and videogame media highlights the importance of understanding how vastly unique forms can coalesce to create new experiences independently representative of their sources of inspiration. Siraaj intends to work with technologies to bridge the gap between his current familiarity with the humanities, image production, and art history with the more product-driven research of software and hardware development.