I am the Principal Research Engineer for XR at ITI Systems and Headwall VR, Beltsville, MD. I graduated with a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park (UMD) and was advised by Dr. Amanda Lazar of The Health, Aging, and Technology Lab. My research work lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, and Extended Reality (XR) and has won best paper awards at ACM SIGCHI Conferences. Specifically, as part of my thesis work, I designed, built, and studied XR systems for remote collaboration and remote expert guidance in hobby settings (e.g. gardening) following user-centered design approaches and mixed-methods analyses. I have also been a part of various research and engineering projects that focus on technology for accessibility. You can find the related, Python, Web, Unity, Swift etc. code for research-related and other projects on my github repo. Some of the repos are private, so feel free to email me (hmaddali at umd dot edu) if interested in a particular project. You can also find links to related publications at the ACM SIGCHI, CSCW, and ASSETS conferences on my projects page. With Headwall VR, I’ve recently won the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s CommanDING Tech UI/UX challenge to design next-gen incident command dashboards for first-responders.

Prior to joining UMD, I obtained my Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech and have worked in various other research, engineering, and teaching roles that you can find on my CV.