Ila Kumar is a PhD student and research engineer designing trauma-responsive socio-digital interventions that support youth well-being, with nine years of experience spanning UX, product, and applied research. Based at MIT after MS work in Affective Computing, she blends therapeutic best practices, co-design, and iterative prototyping to create digital spaces that help marginalized young people express themselves and form supportive connections. Her background ranges from building tutoring and counseling platforms at UPchieve to matching socioemotional research in K-12 settings at Character Lab, giving her both engineering chops and deep domain expertise in safety-centered design. Ila’s work is notable for centering reciprocity and healing-centered frameworks—she continually reflects on her role in practice and prioritizes partnerships with the communities she serves.
9 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Lifelong Kindergarten group, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Lifelong Kindergarten group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
High School, High School at Germantown Friends School
Bachelor of Arts (BA), major in Psychology, minor in Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts (BA), major in Psychology, minor in Computer Science at University of Pennsylvania
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.