Divya Ramachandran earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. She is affiliated with both the Berkeley Institute of Design and Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) research group. Her research is in Human-Computer Interaction, in the area of using mobile, persuasive applications for addressing challenges in health information access and delivery in developing regions.
Divya is currently working on the design and evaluation of a mobile phone application that helps rural health workers in Orissa, India access and share information with their pregnant and postnatal clients using digital media. For this project, she has been conducting fieldwork over the past two years to better understand the social context and design an appropriate, sustainable solution. Her previous work on evaluating the persuasive power of speech interfaces won a best paper award at the Persuasive conference in 2008. She has also previously worked on speech recognition for low-resource languages.
Divya has co-organized a number of workshops on technology design and development, including one held at the Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) conference in 2009. She has also worked at Microsoft Research India in the Technology for Emerging Markets group as an intern. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Utah.