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 — 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.”
More from Evelyn — first-person notes on each project milestone — on the project diary.
Sean Kim
Interim Adult Advisor
Provides infrastructure, scope review, and operational support during the high-school timeline. "Interim" because as MindLens Lab grows, the lab will partner with academic advisors who can shape the research more deeply than any one parent can.
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.
- 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