Sureyya is a UX Research Lead & Strategist at NVIDIA, focused on AI-driven products spanning machine learning, deep learning, and emerging paradigms such as generative and agentic AI. She leads strategic research across NVIDIA's full-stack ecosystem to understand how developers and organizations adopt and operationalize advanced AI capabilities—from large language models to autonomous, task-oriented agents. Her work informs product direction, helping companies modernize workflows, reduce human error, and automate complex, multi-step processes. By grounding AI innovation in real user needs and behaviors, she drives more effective, scalable solutions that improve productivity and decision-making. Her research shapes design strategy and defines how AI platforms are experienced at scale across industries and use cases.
Previously, Sureyya was a Lead Product Design Researcher at Tenable, where she led user research across the company’s cybersecurity portfolio, including vulnerability management, cloud, container, and web application security, as well as security analytics. Her work influenced engineering roadmaps by bringing the needs of security leaders and practitioners—including Chief Information Security Officers, Directors of Information Security, security analysts, DevOps engineers, and SREs—into the product development process.
Prior to that, Sureyya was a Principal Usability Engineer at Oracle, where she conducted end-to-end user research for Sales and Service Cloud applications. She partnered with UX, product management, and development teams to translate field research, participatory design, focus groups, usability testing, and accessibility evaluations into actionable insights. She later joined ServiceNow as a Staff UX Researcher, expanding her work across enterprise cloud experiences in emerging markets, with a focus on mobile workflows for field Customer Service agents, key industry verticals, and Agent Workspace.
In the past, she served as a Member of Research Staff at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where she worked on interactive visual analytics, human-computer interaction, and user experience across healthcare, transportation, and social services. She collaborated with design and development teams to guide product design and was recognized with PARC Exceptional Performance Awards for Customer Impact & Product Launch Support in 2014 and 2015.
During her graduate studies, Sureyya completed two summer internships at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. In 2010, she designed and implemented a user-interface-based ontology-matching mechanism to guide business consultants in creating metrics and heatmaps. In 2012, she built and tested a visual medical terminology assistant that integrates text-based physician documents and clinical ontology semantics.
Sureyya received her Ph.D. and M.S. in 2013 and 2009, respectively, from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she was a member of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Under the supervision of Prof. Ben Shneiderman and Dr. Catherine Plaisant, her doctoral studies focused on visual methods (interactive displays and an information visualization dashboard) that support situation awareness and workflow management in the clinical domain. She has ten granted patents from the USPTO and peer-reviewed publications in the proceedings of CHI (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), CIKM (ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management), and AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) Annual Symposium.
M.J Stefik, D.G Bobrow, H Eldardiry, R.T Krivacic, P Liu, S Tarkan, and E Wu. Computer-Implemented System and Method for Generating Recurring Events, issued Mar 19, 2024. Patent No US 11,934,410.
M.J Stefik, M Singhal, K Albanese, F Ali, E.A Bier, D.G Bobrow, E Cardenas-Sanchez, M.T Darst, G Gavai, R.T Krivacic, and S Tarkan. System and Method for Motivating Parking Enforcement Officer Performance with the Aid of a Digital Computer, issued Oct 26, 2021. Patent App US 11,157,860.
M Singhal, M.J Stefik, S Tarkan, E.A Bier, and R.T Krivacic. System and Method for Visualizing Parking Enforcement Officer Movement in Real-time with the Aid of a Digital Computer, issued Oct 19, 2021. Patent No US 11,151,494.
M.J Stefik, M Singhal, K Albanese, F Ali, E.A Bier, D.G Bobrow, E Cardenas-Sanchez, M.T Darst, H Eldardiry, G Gavai, L Jia, R.T Krivacic, and S Tarkan. System and Method for Facilitating Parking Enforcement Officer Performance in Real-time with the Aid of a Digital Computer, issued Sep 21, 2021. Patent No US 11,126,942.
M.J Stefik, M Singhal, K Albanese, F Ali, E.A Bier, D.G Bobrow, E Cardenas-Sanchez, M.T Darst, H Eldardiry, G Gavai, L Jia, R.T Krivacic, P Liu, and S Tarkan. System and Method for Monitoring Parking Enforcement Officer Performance in Real-time with the Aid of a Digital Computer, issued Sep 14, 2021. Patent No US 11,120,375.
M.J Stefik, M Singhal, K Albanese, F Ali, E.A Bier, D.G Bobrow, E Cardenas-Sanchez, M.T Darst, H Eldardiry, G Gavai, R.T Krivacic, P Liu, and S Tarkan. System and Method for Facilitating Parking Enforcement Officer Dispatching in Real-time with the Aid of a Digital Computer, issued Jul 13, 2021. Patent No US 11,062,241.
M.J Stefik, M Singhal, K Albanese, F Ali, E.A Bier, D.G Bobrow, E Cardenas-Sanchez, M.T Darst, H Eldardiry, G Gavai, R.T Krivacic, and S Tarkan. System and Method for Coordinating Parking Enforcement Officer Patrol in Real-time with the Aid of a Digital Computer, issued Oct 27, 2020. Patent No US 10,817,814.
M.J Stefik, C Eldershaw, L Jia, P Liu, M Taniguchi, S Tarkan, F.E Torres, E Wu, and P Jarvis. System and Method for Tagging and Integrating Event Data into Operational Data with the Aid of a Digital Computer, issued May 26, 2020. Patent No US 10,664,480.
M.J Stefik, D.G Bobrow, H Eldardiry, R.T Krivacic, P Liu, S Tarkan, and E Wu. Computer-Implemented System and Method for Analyzing Organizational Performance from Episodic Data, issued Jul 17, 2018. Patent No US 10,025,829.
M.J Stefik, D.G Bobrow, H Eldardiry, R.T Krivacic, P Liu, S Tarkan, and E Wu. Computer-Implemented System And Method for Performing Event Trend Analysis, filed Jul 16, 2018. Patent App 16/036,797. Pub US 2018/0322173 A1.
M.J Stefik, C Eldershaw, L Jia, P Liu, M Taniguchi, S Tarkan, F.E Torres, E Wu, and P Jarvis. Computer-Implemented System and Method for Integrating Human Observations into Analytics Data, issued Jul 3, 2018. Patent No US 10,013,459.
S Tarkan, Y.L Cheong, B Krivacic, M.J Stefik, and E Wu. Officer Timeline: Designing a Timeline Visualization for Parking Enforcement, January 2016.
S Tarkan, L Franklin, C Plaisant, and B Shneiderman. Guidelines for Ensuring Timely Management of Medical Orders. Better EHR: Usability, workflow and cognitive support in electronic health records. Eds. J Zhang and M Walji. National Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making in Healthcare. ISBN: 978-0-692-26296-2. First Edition. November 2014.
S Tarkan. Interactive Visual Displays for Results Management in Complex Medical Workflows. UMD Computer Science Theses and Dissertations 2013.
S Tarkan, C Plaisant, B Shneiderman, and A.Z Hettinger. Reducing Missed Laboratory Results: Defining Temporal Responsibility, Generating User Interfaces for Test Process Tracking, and Retrospective Analyses to Identify Problems. Proceedings of the American Medical Informatics Association Symposium 2011.
S Tarkan, V Sazawal, A Druin, E Golub, E.M Bonsignore, G Walsh, and Z Atrash. Toque: Designing a Cooking-based Programming Language for and with Children. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2010.
S Tarkan and V Sazawal. Chief Chefs of Z to Alloy: Using a Kitchen Example to Teach Alloy with Z. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Teaching Formal Methods 2009.
A Don, E Zheleva, M Gregory, S Tarkan, L Auvil, T Clement, B Shneiderman, and C Plaisant. Discovering Interesting Usage Patterns in Text Collections: Integrating Text Mining with Visualization. Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management 2007.
S Tarkan. Children's Design Ideas for a Novice Programming Tool (poster). The 40th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education 2009.
K Pantazos, S Tarkan, C Plaisant, and B Shneiderman. Exposing Delays in Multi-Step Processes by Retrospective Analysis. HCIL Technical Report 2012.
S Tarkan, L Franklin, C Plaisant, and B Shneiderman. Design Guidelines for Ensuring Timely Management of Medical Orders. HCIL Technical Report 2012.
K Pantazos, S Tarkan, C Plaisant, and B Shneiderman. Promoting Timely Completion of Multi-Step Processes - A Visual Approach to Retrospective Analysis. HCIL Technical Report 2012.
S Tarkan, C Plaisant, B Sheniderman, and A.Z Hettinger. Ensuring Timely Clinical Lab Test Result Management: A Generative XML Process Model to Support Medical Care. HCIL Technical Report 2011.
S Tarkan. The Formal Specification of a Kitchen Environment. Master's Scholarly Paper. University of Maryland, Department of Computer Science, May 2009.
S Tarkan, V Sazawal, A Druin, E Foss, E Golub, L Hatley, T Khatri, S Massey, G Walsh, and G Torres. Designing a Novice Programming Environment with Children. HCIL Technical Report 2009.
M Gregory, A Don, E Zheleva, S Tarkan, C Plaisant, and B Shneiderman. Shape Search in Temporal Data to Facilitate Knowledge Discovery: A User Interface to find Spikes, Sinks and Slopes. HCIL Technical Report 2007.