Letters of recommendation for Austin Stanbury

The short version

• I am applying to eight programs. Five letters are due December 1, 2026. The last is due January 6, 2027.
• Each school sends you its own email with a personal upload link. There is no shared system, so expect one email per program.
• One letter can serve every program. Please put it on letterhead, sign it, and save it as a PDF, since two schools require that.
• Stanford and NYU also ask a few short rating questions in their form. Everywhere else it is an upload.
• If a link has not arrived when you expect it, check spam first. Several of these systems are filtered by university mail.

Each school, and what it asks of you

What I am applying to do

The question I care about is how knowledge gets from the institutions that hold it to the people who need it: how schools, hospitals and cities teach, and what simulation adds as a medium for that teaching.

For the past several years I have built XR and AI learning systems with university and clinical partners. These include mixed-reality microelectronics training with the Florida Semiconductor Institute under the US Army's SCALE program, VR vocational and emotional skill-building tools for autistic adults deployed across two Massachusetts health networks, and augmented reality for the City of Bartow and Pinellas County parks.

A review I co-authored in 2025 found that XR learning environments record almost nothing about the learner, and that the AI inside them has no access to what the learner is doing. That is the work I want to do in a PhD: build a model of the learner from the sensor data a headset already captures, have a language model reason over it about what would help this person with this task, and keep it open to inspection by instructors.

Why a PhD, and why now

The practice produced the question and cannot answer it. A deployment cannot isolate causes or be checked by a field. I want the methods to run real experiments, to have the work tested by others, and to learn under an advisor. In the long run I want a lab where this work is formalized and passed on.

What committees look for in a letter

• Specific episodes carry more weight than general praise: something you saw me do, and what it showed you.
• A comparison helps. Where do I stand among the students, instructors or collaborators you have worked with? Stanford's form asks this directly.
• Stanford's prompt is a fair checklist for every school: potential for advanced study, intellectual independence, analytical thinking, clear expression, and teaching potential.
• My record is mostly collaborative and applied, so anything you can say from direct experience about my capacity for independent research, and about why doctoral study is the right next step, answers what a committee is most likely to wonder.
• No school states a length. One to two pages is normal.

Who is writing about what

Three letters read best when each covers different ground. This is the division I have in mind, so nobody has to cover everything.

• Hyo KangResearch. The projects we have designed together since my master's, and the lab work I have led in her group.
• Nigel NewbuttThe work with autistic adults, from the first clinical partnership to PATHS, and the methods he taught me for it.
• Tim DiFatoThe Digital Worlds Institute: my teaching, and what I have contributed to the department as student, instructor and outside partner.

Each name opens the page with the specifics for that letter.

Materials

Papers

• Learning Inside the Chip: A Design-Science Approach to Developing MR Lab and an AI Agent for Conceptual, Procedural, and Spatial Understanding in Microelectronics Education
  Cheon, Stanbury, Arjunamahanthi, Kottur and Kang. CHI 2026.
• Towards contextual-based AI: A scoping review of artificial intelligence in X reality for personalized learning
  Liu, Cheon, Stanbury, Jiao, Xing and Kang. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 2025.
• Virtual Tutors for Science Labs: Exploring the Impact of GPT Integration and 3D Tutor Avatars on Student Engagement and Learning Outcomes
  Cheon, Stanbury, Lam, Xu and Kang. CSCW Companion 2025.
• Interactive Learning in Microelectronics Education: Comparing PC and Mixed Reality Approaches for Student Engagement and Visual-Spatial Memory
  Arjunamahanthi, Kottur, Stanbury, Lam, Cheon, Asadizanjani and Kang. CHI Extended Abstracts 2025.
• Immersive Climate Narratives: Using Extended Reality to Raise Climate Change Awareness
  Said, Stanbury, Delhagen and Kang. VRST 2023.
• Covid Reflections: AR in Public Health Communications
  Said, Stanbury, Delhagen and Winger-Bearskin. VRST 2022.
• HoloKeys: Interactive Piano Education Using Augmented Reality and IoT
  Stanbury, Said and Kang. VRST 2021.

CV and statement

My CV (PDF). I will add the statement of purpose draft here when it is ready.