Thijs Roumen is an Assistant Professor at Cornell Tech in the Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, where he directs the Matter of Tech lab. The lab focuses on digital fabrication and the subfield of technical human-computer interaction (HCI). The goal of the lab is to make personal fabrication accessible to everyone, as opposed to being limited to industrialists and hobbyists who currently use fabrication machines. Within fabrication, the lab is primarily interested in speech. Thijs achieved his Ph.D. by creating models for laser cutting machines that are independent, allowing users to reproduce content shared online with known portability. He implemented a suite of software systems and tools that enabled high school students to design and build complex 3D objects using laser cutting, a small step towards a bigger goal. Thijs’ work has been published at top-tier HCI conferences such as ACM CHI and UIST. Previously, he was a Ph.D. student under Patrick Baudisch at the Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany, and worked as a research assistant with Shengdong Zhao at the National University of Singapore. He holds an M.Sc. in Product Design from the University of Southern Denmark and a B.Sc. in Industrial Design from Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands.