An image of Kelly Wang, who has short, straight black hair down to their cheekbones and is wearing a dark blue collared shirt. He is smiling in front of a tapestry of the Great Wave Off Kanagawa.

Kelly Wang

Hello! I'm a third-year Ph.D. student at Northeastern University's Khoury College of Computer Sciences, advised by Dr. Michael Ann DeVito. My research centers marginalized individuals' experiences of privacy in community, particularly in queer and queer-adjacent communities. I am interested in how the sociotechnical environment of communities influence the privacy threats they face, particularly intracommunity tensions, and how we can support the desires of marginalized users to seek meaningful and equitable connection. Moving forward, I am also interested in doing more work with cross-cultural and intersectional perspectives.

I obtained a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, where I learned programming through a mathematics-heavy program while completing a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction focused on the human-centered design process. I then entered my current Ph.D. program at Northeastern University, where I have grown an affinity for qualitative research, including reflexive thematic analysis and constructivist grounded theory.

While I retain training in mathematic, algorithmic, scientific, and design thinking, I most enjoy empirical interpretive research that investigates the complexity and nuance of human reality. I particularly enjoy the reading, writing, and occasional translating I do as part of my research!

See my Google Scholar and Resume.

Ongoing Projects:

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I am collaborating with Eleanor Birrell to investigate privacy protections for vulnerable populations.

Specifically, there is a gap in literature around data fiduciary law, a new paradigm of privacy law that would bind corporations to the "best interests" of those whose data they hold. We want to explore whether this paradigm is a promising solution to protect vulnerable populations specifically, who may have unique or more specific threat models than an arbitrary user. To investigate this, we are currently conducting a Systemization of Knowledge (SoK) on the related privacy literature.

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I am collaborating with Tianshi Li and Yuxi Wu to perform a content analysis of privacy harm posts on Reddit.

We want to identify the types of harms users ask for help on, why they make these posts, and where, if any, there is a role for subject matter experts to support them.

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Finally, I am currently working to write my dissertation proposal!

Publications:

Kelly Wang, Ruochen Liu, Ada Lerner, Abigail Marsh, Tianshi Li. 2026.
Precarious But Active: A Look At Privacy Behaviors in Chinese Transformative Fandom on a Censored and Surveilled Internet. To appear in Proceedings of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS '26), July 20-25, 2026, Calgary, Canada.
Pre-Print PDF

Kelly Wang, Ashlee Milton, Leah Rosenbloom, Erika Melder, Ada Lerner, Michael Ann DeVito. 2026.
"How would I know what I would want from or with them?": Supporting A-Spec Approaches to Developing Relationships Through Online Platforms. Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26), April 13-17, 2026, Barcelona, Spain. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
PDF, ACM Link

Kelly Wang, Dan Bially Levy, Kien T Nguyen, Ada Lerner, and Abigail Marsh. 2024.
Counting Carrds: Investigating Personal Disclosure and Boundary Management in Transformative Fandom. Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24), May 11-16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA. doi: 10.1145/3613904.3642664.
PDF, ACM Link

Press:

For third straight year, Khoury researchers set new publishing benchmark at CHI. 2026. Khoury News.

Khoury researchers showcase record 28 works at CHI 2024. 2024. Khoury News.