Ayesha is conducting research with Dr. Wei Zhang in the Department of Computer Science studying computational biology. She first started her research through the EXCEL program where she was connected to the Extended Reality and Training Lab with Dr. McMahan. Ayesha has published four papers related to her research and presented her research several times. She is also completing an Honor’s thesis on her work.

One of her current projects involves investigating how visual cues in virtual reality affect attention during repetitive manufacturing tasks with robots. In manufacturing environments, workers often perform highly repetitive tasks, which can lead to reduced attention over time. This poses a significant safety risk, especially when humans are in direct contact with robots. Due to this, it’s extremely important to sustain worker attention, thus leading to the creation of this experiment.