I began my PhD project, PercePRS: Public Perception of Polygenic Risk Score (PRS), in November 2021 at the University of Edinburgh. PRS is an emerging genetic technology that estimates an individual’s likelihood of developing common diseases based on patterns across their genome. While it promises to reshape preventive and personalised medicine, its broader use in healthcare and consumer settings remains limited. Here, this hesitation comes not only from scientific uncertainty, but also from social, ethical, and design challenges around accuracy, privacy, and communication.

My research explores how people understand, interpret, and imagine PRS technologies. Using quantitative, qualitative and design methods, I examine how PRS might be integrated into future health services and how interaction design can mediate trust, understanding, and responsibility in this context. By combining perspectives from the fields of HCI and precision medicine, this project investigates what it means to design for genetic prediction technologies that are both scientifically rigorous and socially intelligible and responsible.

Through this work, I introduced the idea of Human-Precision Medicine Interaction (HPMI), a conceptual space that invites the communities to engage more deeply with the design and use of emerging medical and healthcare technologies. As one of the earliest interdisciplinary projects situated between the fields of HCI and precision medicine, this work has been shared across leading venues, including the ACM CHI Conference and Nature Genetics. For further details, please see the related publications below.