BRAT Research Platform
Product Lead & AI Engineer
Research platform
Built conversational practice, study onboarding, and researcher review tools for a UT Austin parenting study.
Overview
BRAT (Boundaries, Resilience and Affection Training) is a conversational role-play and coaching platform where parents practice difficult conversations with a simulated child before trying them at home. It operationalizes PMTO (Parent Management Training, Oregon), an evidence-based parent-training model, into LLM-driven role-play with technique-level feedback. BRAT is a production research platform for a UT Austin parenting study, developed with collaborators across partner universities.
My contribution
As product lead and AI engineer, I translated research requirements into the platform's design and implementation. I built the conversational system, the safety and moderation layer, and the researcher-facing tooling, and integrated the study-operations workflows that move participants from screening through practice and review.
Platform & Conversational System
- Built the role-play and coaching platform on Next.js, React, and Node, deployed on Azure App Service with Azure Blob Storage and a PostgreSQL data layer.
- Implemented PMTO-informed conversational fidelity metrics across dialogue turns, giving researchers a structured way to assess session quality.
- Contributed safety guardrails, input and output moderation rules, and session-review workflows for participant-facing interactions.
Study Operations & Researcher Tooling
- Integrated Qualtrics-based screening, consent, and onboarding into the platform, standardizing participant handoff.
- Built a researcher dashboard for session retrieval, transcript review, and participant progress monitoring.
- Built a quantitative data pipeline enabling clinician and researcher review of multilingual interaction data.
Technologies & Tools
Deliverables & outcomes
- Deployed a production research platform supporting a UT Austin parenting study.
- Implemented PMTO-informed fidelity metrics that let researchers assess session quality at the level of technique.
- Standardized participant screening, consent, and onboarding through integrated Qualtrics workflows.
- Built researcher tooling for transcript review and progress monitoring across multilingual sessions.