Making the digital accessible for everyone

Shamika Klassen was enraptured by technology as a girl. As she grew up, she saw the industry fall short of its ideals while leaving certain kinds of people—especially Black women, femmes and nonbinary people—behind. 

Studying information science was an opportunity to bring her experience as a technology chaplain and her interest in technowomanism together in ways that encouraged her to ask questions about how technology could work better for people. While under the guidance of her advisor as a doctoral candidate in CU Boulder’s information science department, Shamika’s interests expanded to the research ethics of how public data is collected and used.

Today, as a user experience researcher at Google, she’s challenging one of the industry’s biggest players to be more inclusive in the development and deployment of new technology.