Chau Vu PO ’26 was named one of eight North American recipients of the 2026 Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award last month for her research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
Vu is the first Pomona College student to receive the distinction and the sole awardee from a liberal arts college this year. The highest honor in computing research for undergraduate students, the award recognizes technological advancements that create positive change.
She worked with Alexandra Papoutsaki, associate professor of computer science at Pomona to study personal informatics and tracking technologies and with Jingyi Li, assistant professor of computer science at Pomona, on developing creativity support tools. Their research began through the Computing Research Association’s inaugural Undergraduate Research to PhD Mentoring (UR2PhD) program and found that apps intended to track babies’ long-term development are instead used to manage daily responsibilities and goals.
Their findings offer a clearer picture of how families really use tracking technology and help designers build tools that better support the fast-paced, day-to-day realities of caring for a newborn.
College officials have said that Vu’s incredible achievement underlines Pomona’s commitment to creating impactful faculty-student relationships.
“In addition to highlighting Chau’s talent and dedication in her field, this award exemplifies Pomona’s strong, long-standing support for undergraduate research in STEM, made possible by enthusiastic faculty mentorship and College funding for student research and conference travel,” Stephen V. Marks, associate dean of the college and Elden Smith professor of economics, wrote in a statement to TSL.
Vu, a computer science major, acknowledged the myth that it is harder to do research at liberal arts colleges. However, she said the accessible one-on-one mentorship and student-centered resources available at a liberal arts college were imperative to expanding her research.
“I could only do that because I’m here at Pomona. The [Computer Science] department is small and everyone is nice and supportive. That’s the only reason why I [could] talk to them so early on,” Vu said.
“I could only do that because I’m here at Pomona,” Vu said. “The [Computer Science] department is small and everyone is nice and supportive. That’s the only reason why I [could] talk to them so early on.”
She came to Pomona intending to study computer science, and her aspirations quickly zeroed in on HCI, which she described as a way to study technology that focuses on users’ benefits and needs.
“In Human-Computer Interaction, we ask [this] critical question: Is the thing that we’re building actually helping people?” she said.
Driven by her desire to help people through technology, Vu said that reaching out to her computer science mentors as a first-year student marked the start of her research career.
She emphasized the dual commitment to teaching and research among Pomona faculty.
“People know that professors at Pomona enjoy teaching and that’s why they’re here,” Vu said. “But they’re also very passionate about doing research with students. So it’s a complement of both.”
Papoutsaki, who first met Vu as her teaching assistant, described the college as uniquely positioned to support HCI research. She noted that the field attracts motivated students from a variety of backgrounds and that Pomona’s small, close-knit community enables them to become productive researchers early on in their college careers..
Their research together on apps for infant development and care was accepted to the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025) last year, where it received an Honorable Mention Award, placing it in the top five percent of submissions. Vu presented the work in Yokohama, Japan.
For Vu, this experience, along with the CRA Award, demonstrated that meaningful research can happen in a liberal arts setting. She attributed her national recognition to both her technical skills and her breadth of education.
“Because I’m at Pomona, I have the opportunity to exercise my skills as both an academic and a programmer,” Vu said. “It’s the balance between deep thinking and building.”
Administrators said the college purposefully built this immersive environment for undergraduate students.
“We strive to provide undergraduate students access to opportunities for which many students elsewhere have to wait until graduate school,” Brent Carbajal, interim vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college, wrote in a statement to TSL.
The CRA award has also reshaped how Vu views her future, and she said the recognition signals something larger.
“It means that the work that I’ve done reached a broader audience. It makes me very happy that people are aware that we should ask these critical questions,” she said.
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