I have some news that still feels a little surreal to write down: Professor Síle O’Modhrain has agreed to serve as the faculty advisor for Run Like a Fish.
If you’ve been following this project, you know it started with a deceptively simple question — how do you give a visually impaired runner enough information to run freely and safely, without overwhelming them? Everything since then, from the white papers to the Lateral Line Runner concept to the virtual simulator, has been an attempt to answer that question honestly. Having someone of Professor O’Modhrain’s stature willing to guide that work is the kind of thing I didn’t dare hope for when I began.
Who she is
Professor O’Modhrain is a faculty member at the University of Michigan, with appointments in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance (in Performing Arts Technology) and the School of Information. Her research sits right at the heart of what this project cares about: haptics — the science of touch and gesture — and the design of new interfaces that let people sense and act on information in ways that don’t depend on a screen.
Her path to that work is remarkable. She earned a BA in music from Trinity College Dublin and a licentiate in piano teaching from Trinity College London, then an MS in music technology from the University of York and a PhD in computer-based music theory from Stanford. Along the way she has done research at the MIT Media Lab, Media Lab Europe, and the Sonic Arts Research Center at Queen’s University Belfast, and even worked as an audio engineer and program producer for BBC Radio. It’s an unusually deep blend of music, engineering, psychoacoustics, and cognition — exactly the mix you’d want from someone thinking about how a runner might “feel” the path ahead.
That thread runs all the way back to the start of her career. In the mid-1990s, at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, she and mechanical engineer Brent Gillespie built a haptic device called the Moose — a way for blind users to feel a computer’s graphical interface rather than see it. It worked something like a mouse, except it was powered: it could push back, so that the objects on a Microsoft Windows screen became physically present under your hand. The edge of a window turned into a groove you could trace; a checkbox became a spring that either pulled you in or pushed you away depending on whether it was ticked; you could even feel the weight of a file as you dragged it across the desktop. The idea was simple and, to me, profound — let the sense of touch carry information the eyes would normally handle, freeing up attention for everything else. That is, almost exactly, the premise behind a wearable that guides a runner without flooding them with sound or asking them to look.
The Moose was the beginning of a much longer arc. Decades later, reunited with Gillespie, she carried the same conviction in a new direction: a full-page refreshable braille display, sometimes nicknamed the “Holy Braille.” For years, refreshable braille devices have shown only a single line of text at a crippling cost. Through her work at Michigan and the company she co-founded, New Haptics Corporation, she set out to change that — developing an affordable display that can raise thousands of dots at once to render not just text but tactile graphics. It’s a genuine attempt to give blind readers access to information that sighted people take for granted.
And here is the part I find most meaningful: Professor O’Modhrain is herself blind. Her research isn’t designed for a community she observes from the outside — it grows out of her own daily experience of where existing technology falls short. That perspective has shaped everything she builds, and it’s been recognized formally, including an honorable mention for the University of Michigan’s James T. Neubacher Award, which honors work advancing the rights and inclusion of people with disabilities.
SHE IS ALSO A RUNNER! On the day I asked her to approve this blog post she told me she was headed out to run 6 miles with her guide runner. This is personal forher and I am so fortunate to have access to her expertise.
Why this means so much for Run Like a Fish
A lot of assistive technology is designed by people guessing at what would help. The whole premise of Run Like a Fish is that we should test our guesses rigorously and stay honest about what actually reduces a runner’s cognitive load and keeps them safe. Professor O’Modhrain has spent a career doing exactly that — building non-visual interfaces that people will actually trust enough to rely on, and being clear-eyed about the ones that don’t work.
Having her as an advisor means the project now has a sounding board who understands haptic feedback from the inside out, who knows how to turn a promising idea into a defensible research instrument, and who can tell me, kindly but plainly, when an idea is more exciting than it is useful. That’s the kind of mentorship that makes a project better.
Thank you
Professor O’Modhrain, thank you. Thank you for being willing to lend your time, your expertise, and your support to a high school research project — and for taking it seriously enough to help make it real. I know how much is asked of your schedule, and the fact that you’ve chosen to invest some of it here means more than I can easily say.
I can’t wait to learn from you. Onward.
This post is part of an ongoing research series at runlikeafish.blog exploring biomimetic approaches to assistive technology for visually impaired runners. If you’re a visually impaired runner, a guide, or a researcher working in this space, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at brooke@runlikeafish.blog