Hi
My name is Emily 👋
🎨My childhood dream was to be like Santa and make toys everyday. I think I’m getting close — I’m a designer, engineer, and student at Harvard passionate about advancing human-centered technology. My experience spans design, AI hardware, tactile sensing, computational design, digital fabrication, and HCI research.
📍I am currently in San Francisco, interning at Samsung Research America’s Computational Design Group. Previously at Striv, I led design engineering and worked across AI Hardware research, prototyping, manufacturing operations, and brand strategy to bring AI smart wearables for athletic performance from prototype to market. I have also been doing HCI research at MIT CSAIL, CMU HCII, and Pratt Morphology, with papers published in ACM CHI, UIST, and SCF.
🎾 In my free time, I like to play tennis, ski, and eat delicious food (fun fact: I used to work as a chef!)
💡 I am always open for collaboration! You can reach me at emily_guan@mde.harvard.edu
Work Experience
2026 - NOW | Samsung Research America | Computational Design & Sensor Hardware Research Intern
2024 - 2025 | Striv | Founding Team Member and Design Engineer Lead
2024 - 2025 | MIT HCI Engineering Group | Visiting Researcher
2022 - 2025 | Pratt Center for Experimental Structure | Research Assistant
2023 - 2024| Morphing Matter Lab | Design and Research Intern
Research Publication
Emily Guan and Yibo Fu. 2023. Fold It: Creating Foldable 3D Volumes From Planar 2D Surfaces. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication (SCF '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 16, 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1145/3623263.3629153
Emily Guan, Di Wu, Qiuyu Lu, and Lining Yao. 2024. Design and Simulation Tool for Sequentially and Conditionally Programmable Waxpaper Morphing Interfaces. 2024. In Extended Abstracts of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 399, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3648661
Di Wu, Emily Guan, Yunjia Zhang, Hsuanju Lai, Qiuyu Lu, and Lining Yao. 2024. Waxpaper Actuator: Sequentially and Conditionally Programmable Wax Paper for Morphing Interfaces. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 865, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642373
🏅Best Paper Nominee. Jiaji Li, Shuyue Feng, Maxine Perroni-Scharf, Yujia Liu, Emily Guan, Guanyun Wang, and Stefanie Mueller. 2025. Xstrings: 3D Printing Cable-Driven Mechanism for Actuation, Deformation, and Manipulation. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 6, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3714282
Junyi Zhu, Tianyu Xu, Jiayu Wang, Emily Guan, JaeYoung Moon, Stiven Morvan, D Shin, Andrea Colaço, Stefanie Mueller, Karan Ahuja, Yiyue Luo, and Ishan Chatterjee. 2025. EI-Lite: Electrical Impedance Sensing for Micro-gesture Recognition and Pinch Force Estimation. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 23, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3746059.3747671
Yibo Fu, Emily Guan, Jianzhe Gu, Dinesh K Patel, Justin U Soza Soto, Yichi Luo, Carmel Majidi, Josiah Hester, and Lining Yao. 2025. DropPop: Designing Drop-to-Deploy Mechanisms with Bistable Scissors Structures. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 40, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1145/3746059.3747657
Education
Harvard University | Master in Design Engineering
Pratt Institute | Bachelor of Architecture, Minor in Human-Computer Interaction