Melissa Chen
PhD Researcher at Northwestern University
Greater Chicago Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMelissa Chen is a PhD researcher in computer science at Northwestern with eight years of software and research experience building AI-driven, IDE-integrated interventions to support student self-efficacy in programming. She blends rigorous qualitative methods—longitudinal interviews, focus groups, and design-based research—with practical systems work from prior internships at Lyft and Facebook to iterate on tools that students actually use. Her background includes server-side engineering for production features and experiments, plus open-source Python contributions to the well-known one-line-wonders repository, demonstrating a taste for concise, elegant code. At Northwestern she has led co-design workshops and evaluated scalable educational interventions, and she also mentors and teaches graduate students in communicating research effectively. Comfortable moving between code, user studies, and pedagogy, she aims to make developer tools and curricula more inclusive and evidence-driven.
8 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Northwestern UniversityBachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
traditional chinese, Japanese, Spanish, English
Github Skills (7)
python10
data-structure9
algorithm9
data-structures9
algorithms9
cpp3
bash3
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
wzhouwzhou/one-line-wonders
Oct 2018 - Oct 2018
OneLineWondersCode | 1000+ Commits | 279/300 One Liners | 200+ Forks | Actively maintained open-source collection of "one-line" programs performing various tasks in different languages
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 6 PRs in 3 days
Contributions summary:Melissa contributed several Python one-liners within the `one-line-wonders` repository. Their commits focused on creating concise code solutions for various programming challenges, including a matrix multiplier, palindrome checker, and finding a missing number in an array. They also addressed a calculation of a derivative. The primary focus was on writing functional code snippets in Python.
pythonc-programmingpowershellhaskelljavascript
IllinoisWCS/mbti-board
Jan 2021 - Jul 2021
A website to show the MBTI personality types of Illinois WCS Members.
Contributions:18 reviews, 59 commits, 30 PRs in 5 months
wcsreactillinoisjavascriptmembers
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