Team
A small team building toward bigger emotional support.
We're building research foundations for future learning tools that may help autistic children, others on the autism spectrum (ASD), and anyone who finds reading and exchanging emotion difficult. Phase 1 is data collection; later phases will turn that data into validated study materials and adaptive tools. Below is who's working on it now, and where we're looking to grow.
Founder & Researcher
Evelyn Kim
11th grade, Singapore American School. Author of “Artificial Intelligence in Emotional Intelligence Training for Autism” — Curieux Academic Journal, July 2025; also on the UNESCO Learning Planet Institute Youth Fellow platform (PDF) — the paper that started this work.
Phase 1 lead: study design, taxonomy, clip curation, participant outreach, data analysis.
Founder's note
“I started this when I noticed that AI tools meant to help autistic learners read emotion were giving one answer per moment — but the people I asked rarely agreed on that answer. Building a better tool on a single-answer foundation felt like starting on the wrong floor. So I'm building the dataset first: how does the same moment actually get read by many people? Phase 1 is gathering those readings. Phase 2 is using them to teach.”
The full story of how the project took its current shape — paper findings, the pivot, what I learned along the way — is on the research page. First-person notes on individual milestones are on the project diary.
Educator Advisor
An educator advisor who has supported Evelyn in pursuing advanced mathematics and continues to offer broader mentorship — both inside math and across the curiosities Evelyn brings to it. She helps MindLens Lab as an educator collaborator, giving ongoing holistic feedback on the project as it evolves.
Name and photo held until the advisor's personal approval of her public listing.
We're growing
Roles open to the right people
MindLens Lab is small on purpose. Phase 1 is data collection — once we're ready for Phase 2 (validated study materials), we want to partner with people who deepen the research, not extend the scaffolding. Roles we're thinking about:
- Faculty advisor — cognitive science, developmental psychology, autism research, or emotion recognition. To shape methodology beyond Phase 1.
- Educator collaborator — someone working with neurodiverse learners who can co-design the eventual study materials and ground them in classroom reality.
- Researcher (read-only) — for statistical or qualitative analysis of the dataset, with the option to co-author findings.
Interested? Email contact@mindlenslab.org with a short note about how you'd engage.
With thanks to
Acknowledgments
- Curieux Academic Journal — for publishing the originating paper and providing a venue for high-school student research.
- UNESCO Learning Planet Institute Youth Fellow platform — for hosting the paper and connecting it to a global youth-research community.
- Singapore American School — for the academic environment that made the originating paper possible.
- Every participant — every reading you contribute is the substance of this work.
Reach the team: contact@mindlenslab.org