As part of the At-Risk Research Program that Sunny founded and leads, she and her collaborators have developed a framework for unifying at-risk user research, guidance for conducting safer research that involves at-risk users, and they've investigated the digital-safety experiences of youth, online content creators, people involved with political campaigns, survivors of intimate partner abuse, people who have experienced image-based sexual abuse or financial scams, and several others. She previously led Google's Security & Privacy User Experience (UX) team for several years, and has also worked to improve security warnings in the Chrome browser.
 

Prior to Google, Sunny was a Research Scientist at Intel Labs Seattle. While at Intel, she investigated how to use mobile technologies to encourage health & wellness — particularly physical activity and healthy sleep behaviors — and to help people be more aware of the privacy implications of sensing and inference systems. Sunny has also investigated peoples' understanding of and privacy concerns related to Wi-Fi use, designed and evaluated tools to help people be more aware of what they expose when they use Wi-Fi, examined privacy implications of location-enhanced technologies, and developed technologies to help older adults age in place.

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Before Intel Labs, Sunny worked in Silicon Valley on Web design and usability. As a co-founder of Propel, she recruited and led their UX team to develop e-commerce storefronts and tools for merchandising, customer support, and site administration. Sunny also focused on usability research at Infoseek and Go.com where she worked on early versions of web search, email, chat, account set-up, personalization, and more.

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In her 20+ years as a human-computer interaction researcher and practitioner, Sunny has been a regular contributor to the academic literature. She has co-authored over 70 papers and articles in peer-reviewed venues and received several awards (see Publications). Sunny was recognized in 2022 with the Distinguished Alumni Award by the University of Washington's iSchool. She was elected into the ACM's SIGCHI Academy in 2020, and served a 3-year term as Chair of the SIGCHI Academy Award subcommittee. She has been featured in the press, including WIRED and Scientific American Mind. Sunny received her Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Washington. She is a Certified Information Privacy Professional (US) and serves as an Officer on the Board of Governors for the Human-Computer Interaction Consortium (HCIC). 

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Sunny's Google Scholar page (launches in new tab/window)

Sunny's page on research.google (launches in new tab/window)

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