Portfolio

Case Studies

Featured

CommunityCrit

How might we increase and diversify participation in urban planning through a collaborative web tool?

Food System Vision Prize

How might Colombo, Sri Lanka imagine healthy, sustainable food futures by the year 2050?

Digital psychiatry

How might we study and strengthen mental health care worldwide using design and technology?

Voicing Water Visions

How might we promote inclusive water governance using participatory media?

Research

I currently work with Professor Nilam Ram at Stanford University, funded by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

Previously, I’ve conducted research at the UCSD Design Lab (advised by Professor Steven Dow), Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (advised by Dr. John Torous), and the International Water Management Institute (advised by Dr. Simon Langan).

I’ve also assisted with policy research for the “Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence” initiative, led by the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and MIT Media Lab.

Peer-reviewed publications:

Torous, J., Lipschitz, J., Ng, M., & Firth, J. (2020). Dropout rates in clinical trials of smartphone apps for depressive symptoms: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders, 263, 413-419. [pdf]
Ng, M., Firth, J., Minen, M., & Torous, J. (2019). User engagement in mental health apps: a review of measurement, reporting, and validity. Psychiatric Services, 70(7), 538-544. [pdf]
Mahyar, N., James, M. R., Ng, M., Wu, R. A., & Dow, S. P. (2018). CommunityCrit: inviting the public to improve and evaluate urban design ideas through micro-activities. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘18). Montreal, Canada. April 2018. [pdf]

Conference presentations:

Ng, M., Cho, M., Eichstaedt, J., Reeves, B., Robison, T., Ram, N. (2023). Characterizing “bottom-up” engagement with climate communication with mobile sensing. 73nd Annual International Communication Association (ICA) Conference. Toronto, Canada. May 2023.
Ng, M., Suhardiman, D., Langan, S., Merrey, D., & Karki, E. (2022). Contesting hydropower narratives in Nepal: disjunctures between academic literature and community perspectives. 72nd Annual International Communication Association (ICA) Conference. Paris, France. May 2022.
Ng, M. and Ram, N. (2022). Affective sensitivity to air quality: person-specific correlations between air quality and affective states. Society for Affective Science’s 2022 Annual Meeting. Virtual. March 2022.
Crayton, A., Fonseca, J., Mehra, K., Ng, M., Ross, J., Sandoval-Castaneda, M., & von Gnechten, R. (2020). Narratives and Needs: Analyzing Experiences of Cyclone Amphan Using Twitter Discourse. “Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning” Workshop at the 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). Virtual. December 2020. [pdf]

Communications

I take photos! Click to see some of my favorites.

Multimedia

I’ve produced multimedia for a daily newspaper, biomedical and environmental research institutes, a production studio, nonprofits, and more.

Participatory media stories shared at over a dozen international conferences, partner meetings, and project dissemination workshops, including Stockholm World Water Week (2019)
Fiction film selected for screening at Harvard’s Ghungroo Festival (2017)
Harvard Foundation Award for Intercultural and Race Relations (2016)
Three photographs exhibited at Harvard Art Show (2016)
Film screened by World Health Organization and World Bank at first-ever conference about global mental health care (2016)

Writing

“Citizen science to empower women in community-based groundwater governance," REACH, 2018.

“Giving water a second life," The International Water Management Institute, 2018.

“The Importance of Land and the Impacts of Loss," Planetary Health Alliance, 2018.

“Helping Doctors Find the Best Cure for Cancer," The Jackson Laboratory, 2018.

“Preserving Fertility," The Jackson Laboratory, 2015.

“Getting to Know Ewelina Bolcun-Filas, Ph.D.," The Jackson Laboratory, 2015.