Award-Winning Thesis by Natasha Obukhova Featured in OEC Magazine
"Because I can promise you: if you're studying people with lived experience of trauma, secondary trauma will happen": Researcher's safety in HCI research with traumatized communities
Studying trauma can be tough on researchers too, but in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), their well-being is often overlooked. In her Master's thesis, Natalia Obukhova interviewed ten HCI practitioners and found weak support systems, scarce formal guidelines and a heavy dependence on informal advice. Also, universities rarely provide enough counseling and training. To address these gaps, Obukhova sug- gests better counseling, training, and ethical processes, alongside a prototype app ,,We are also humans'' designed to support researchers' self-care.
The thesis was one of 11 award-winning projects across Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 and was selected as one of five works featured in the December 2025 issue of OEC Magazine.