Keynote by Georgianna (Blue) Lin, PhD, on End-to-End Research to Foster Holistic Menstrual Health Sensemaking, May 20th, 2026
We are pleased to invite you to join this guest lecture, which is part of Cycles of Care, a spring workshop series at the UZH Digital Society Initiative’s Health Community: Cycles of Care.
“End-to-End Research to Foster Holistic Menstrual Health Sensemaking”
📅 Wednesday, 20 May 2026 – 17.15 – 18:00h
📍 University of Zurich, Digital Society Initiative, Building SOC, Rämistrasse 69 or 💻 Hybrid/Zoom
About the Lecture
This keynote presents an end-to-end research approach to support holistic menstrual health sensemaking from integrating data collection, analysis, to real-world use. Drawing on mixed-methods work spanning qualitative research, statistical and machine learning approaches, and system deployment, the talk examines how multimodal data, including wearable sensing, can be leveraged to support users in making sense of complex, cyclical health data and translating insights into informed action. Framed within an intersectional perspective on sex and gender, this work emphasizes the importance of inclusive study design and analytical methods that account for diverse bodies and lived experiences. It also explores how menstrual-relevant signals can be derived from general-purpose sensing infrastructures, expanding access to menstrual health insights.
About Georgianna (Blue) Lin
Blue is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Columbia University working with Xuhai “Orson” Xu and Noémie Elhadad on multi-agent systems for Women’s health.
She prioritizes building tools that enhance user agency and facilitate informed decisions about well-being in everyday contexts. This involves applying her expertise in human-computer interaction, AI, machine learning, statistical methods, and human physiology to a range of challenges, from designing novel multimodal health trackers to developing LLM-based agents for personalized goal creation and fulfillment.
She recieved my doctorate at the University of Toronto, advised by Khai N. Truong and Alex Mariakakis, where she focused on understanding how individuals engage with complex, multimodal personal data and developing user-centered designs and systems to help people navigate uncertainty and align tools with their diverse mental models. Previously, she completed my Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology where she worked with Thad Starner and Neha Kumar.
She is honored to have received several notable awards, including the Google PhD Fellowship, Wolfond Fellowship, and GVU Distinguished Masters Student Award.
About the Workshop Series
Digital women’s health sits at the intersection of medicine, technology, sociology, and intersectionally feminist design. Yet, despite growing evidence of sex- and gender-specific differences, their integration into research design, data analysis, and applied practice remains fragmented, inconsistent, and methodologically underdeveloped.
This workshop series therefore brings together researchers and practitioners across medicine, technology, sociology, and feminist design who work with sex- and gender-specific data focusing on
- how to better (best) integrate such data into research and practice
- sharing evidence and best-case practices and
- identify and closing gaps and biases in data, design, communication, and care
Each workshop session will combine keynote inputs, interactive group work, and open discussion.
Contributions and materials from the sessions will feed into a living document compiling best practices, tools, and resources (e.g., validated questionnaires, datasets, GitHub repositories, R packages, and design principles). The goal is to translate these insights into a joint scholarly publication advancing the field of digital women’s health together with all interested workshop participants.