Vishal is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He studies the design, deployment, and implications of emerging digital systems, including AI, to nurture socio-ecologically just and sustainable futures.

Trained across computer science, information science, and human-centered design, he brings together expertise in sustainability, global development, and human-computer interaction (HCI), informed by lived experience across Global South and North contexts. He employs qualitative, participatory, and design-oriented methods to examine how people interact with emerging technologies under conditions of climate vulnerability, labor precarity, and structural inequality, bridging HCI scholarship on sustainability and development. He has conceptualized Post-Growth HCI as a critical area of inquiry that foregrounds the underlying economic assumptions that structure technological development, questioning the inevitability of scale and the primacy of market-driven innovation. He founded the Post-Growth HCI Collective to advance HCI research, design, and practice oriented toward care for our beautiful planet and all its residents. His research values are elaborated in his reflective essay Reflection, Reckoning, and Refusal.

Vishal has a PhD in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech, an MS in Computer & Information Science from UC Irvine, and a BE in Computer Science and Engineering from Chitkara University, India. He has published in venues such as ACM CHI and CSCW, receiving recognitions, such as the Interaction Design for International Development Award. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Microsoft Research, the Office of Sustainability at Georgia Tech, and the Office of the Provost at Notre Dame. He is a former fellow of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems and a co-editor of the ACM Interactions forum Climate for Change. He also worked as a software engineer at Informatica Inc., developing automated software testing frameworks.