Yihao Dong, in a few paragraphs

I grew up speaking Mandarin and now live and work in Sydney, where I've spent the better part of a decade at the University of Sydney: first as an undergraduate juggling a computing degree with a commerce one, then as a tutor, and since July 2024 as a PhD candidate in the aid-lab with Associate Professor Anusha Withana.

My research is about touch as a channel for spatial information. Sighted people take in the layout of a room in a glance; I'm interested in what a wearable haptic interface would have to do to offer something comparable to someone who cannot see, and in the perceptual questions underneath that: how skin encodes shape, how early a cue can arrive and still feel like part of a touch, and how much of this the brain will learn to use.

The commerce half of my degree shows up more than I expected. I care about whether a thing is usable and worth building, not only whether it works, and I like the parts of research that involve sitting with people and finding out what they need.