Growing up in Portland, Oregon, I have been surrounded by creative energy and aesthetic beauty all my life. For the past decade, I’ve lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts: a vibrant, intellectually stimulating, and eclectic urban community that is full of diverse cultures and exciting new ideas. I am now finally back home in the Pacific Northwest, where I am excited to begin the next chapter in my career.

Throughout my dynamic career, I’ve worked side-by-side with top-level executives, product managers, marketing directors, business analysts, developers, and visual designers, helping them craft transformative, end-to-end user experiences.

I am an empathetic, experienced field researcher who can competently gather user requirements and translate them into personas, user journeys, and successful UI designs. When appropriate, I am able to develop richly interactive prototypes. I am also fairly comfortable with basic HTML, CSS, Javascript, and scripting languages, like PHP.

With all my work, I take a keen interest in bringing business objectives and user objectives inline, with an emphasis on maximizing ROI. I am very passionate about the field of usability and I am constantly striving to further my knowledge and skills in this arena so that I can improve my overall effectiveness as a user experience and media consultant. In a similar spirit, I also spend a lot of time focusing on the interactive enhancement of UI design deliverables and improving the iterative design/validation process as a whole.

I’ve always had a great passion for holistic nutrition and fitness, as well as the public policies and politics that impact people’s health. I enjoy creating social applications that encourage civic engagement and collaborative analysis so that people can better inform or empower themselves. In this mission, I am fascinated by the fluid, evolving construction of social representations and the role that emotional intelligence plays in design and communication. How are social representations influenced by various forms of media, and how do they impact the behaviors, beliefs, habits, or decisions of various individuals and groups? Furthermore, in what ways can emotion be leveraged to meaningfully enrich digital interactions and ultimately lead to positive change? These are the sorts of questions I love to think about.