New tools and models like Generative AI and large language models are changing the workforce expectations. I am studying how to enhance cross-disciplinary learning and innovation needed for people's sustainable competencies needed for the future of work. In particular, I focus on the growing phenomenon around interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary computing education. I investigate how to support learning and innovation in these converging fields. My recent work in this area involved better understanding and improving learning and skill competencies as well as pedagogies at Cornell University's School of Computing and Information Science. It also extends my ongoing research at Columbia University where I investigated and created interventions for innovative workplace learning and development and work strategies. 

My research trajectory points toward the need to examine the changing processes and methods of innovation and learning by looking at learning and workplace environments as mutually shaping sociotechnical environments. To this end, I explore how learners (or workers) collectively construct intersectoral knowledge by working across diverse knowledge domains and making new sociotechnical systems and and/or tools. Through my field research and practice in innovative learning communities of practice and spaces, I am theorize a learning and innovation framework and suggest useful practices and organizational/infrastructure design for the future of work.

For my dissertation study, I investigated how knowledge coordination and sharing occurs at a global technology and media corporation, with its core Tech identity associated with having an open culture and a flat organizational structure. Workers were well aware that their organization was not the conventional hierarchical systems with reporting lines going up the ladder to upper management. Instead, they would often say that "you don't work for your boss; your boss works for you." I found during my fieldwork that changes that are made in organizations as a result of new technologies (like enterprise social network systems, ESNSs) are not so linear and deterministic as conventionally understood. As new tools get introduced and adopted, workers created and adjusted their knowledge and coordination systems fitting for their cultural and sociotechnical infrastructure. Even when organizations remove rigid structure and allow flexibility, alternative structures may include elements of traditional, hierarchical structures that workers find useful. Collaboration tools like ESNSs in this context facilitated localizing information, creating tradeoffs when members collaborate across-functionally.