I’ve applied my background in cognitive science and machine learning to build AI-powered products that are grounded in research, scalable in production, and human-centered by design.
At Cangrade, a B2B SaaS company delivering predictive hiring solutions, I’ve led product-focused research efforts and brought multiple tools to market:
AI Copilot: A generative AI assistant that automates hiring workflows. I led the product development and launch, translating NLP and LLM advances into a seamless user experience.
Resume Ranker: An AI-based scoring tool that evaluates resumes against hiring criteria. I owned this product from concept through prototyping, engineering handoff, and go-to-market planning.
Position-Specific Assessments (Patent Pending): A tool that uses LLMs to generate custom skill assessments directly from job descriptions. I led product strategy and development, and filed the corresponding patent.
Beyond product development, I’ve conducted user and market research, competitive analyses, and authored industry-facing white papers that were featured in Fast Company, HR.com, Yahoo!, and others. These efforts not only guided product direction but also helped position the company as a leader in Responsible AI.
At IBM Research, I worked with Dr. Rachel Ostrand to investigate how spontaneous speech could serve as a biomarker of cognitive decline. I analyzed linguistic data from older adults, built part-of-speech tagging tools in Python, and supported early ideation for a clinician-facing product for dementia screening.
I began my research journey as an undergraduate at Florida State University, where I joined three labs to explore diverse areas of cognitive science:
Dr. Walter Boot – attention and visual search
Dr. Colleen Kelley – memory and directed forgetting
Dr. Michael Kaschak – language processing and structural priming
After graduating, I worked as a lab coordinator for Dr. Arielle Borovsky, where I led day-to-day operations for a longitudinal study on language development in infants. This role strengthened my skills in participant management, experimental design, and team mentorship.
I went on to earn my Ph.D. in Cognitive Science at Florida State under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Kaschak. My research focused on linguistic alignment and language production, resulting in four peer-reviewed publications (three as first author). I led experimental design, analysis, and manuscript development, while mentoring undergraduates and teaching data science with R.
These academic experiences gave me a strong foundation in empirical thinking, structured experimentation, and clear communication — all of which inform my work as a product-minded research scientist today.
Brousse, C., Chia, K., Kaschak, M.P. Non-sentential responses to requests for information, 53, 1207-1225 (2025). DOI
Chia, K. and Kaschak, M.P. Elliptical responses to direct and indirect requests for information, Language and Speech, 67(1), 228-254 (2023) DOI
Chia, K., Edwards, A.A., Schatschneider, C., and Kaschak, M.P. Structural Repetition in Responses to Indirect Requests, Discourse Processes, 60(9), 634-654 (2023). DOI
Chia, K. and Kaschak, M.P. It’s not you, it’s me: Some Speakers Elicit Structural Priming More Reliably Than Others. Collabra (2022). DOI
Chia, K. and Kaschak, M.P. Structural priming in question-answer dialogues. Psychon Bull Rev (2021). DOI
Long, M., Chia, K., & Kaschak, M. P. Pointing to the Future of Language Research. Journal of cognition, 4(1), 41. (2021) DOI
Chia, K., Hetzel-Ebben, H., Adolph, M. et al. Examining the factors that affect structural repetition in question answering. Mem Cogn 48, 1046–1060 (2020). DOI
Chia, K., Axelrod, C., Johnson, C. et al. Structural Repetition in Question Answering: A Replication and Extension of Levelt and Kelter (1982), Discourse Processes, 56:1, 2-23 (2019). DOI