Growing up in Portland, Oregon, I have been surrounded by creative energy and aesthetic beauty all my life. For a decade, I also lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts: a vibrant, intellectually stimulating, and eclectic urban community that is full of diverse cultures and exciting new ideas. Today, I am finally back home in the Pacific Northwest, but I still enjoy bouncing back and forth between the left and right coasts to get a good dose of both environments.

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 UX designs. When appropriate, I am able to develop richly interactive prototypes. Considering that my wife is a seasoned engineering manager and software development lead, I am also fluent enough that I can effectively strategize with devs as we iteratively translate designs into optimal front-end UI code for web and mobile apps.

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 eternally passionate about User Experience. I’ve been an active member of this professional community since its inception at the dawn of the 21st century, when it was still referred to as “Human Factors” or “Human-Computer Interaction.” Still, I constantly strive to evolve my knowledge and skills so that I can be maximally effective as a domain leader, mentor, and consultant. I am perpetually obsessed with enhancing my teams’ interactive UX design deliverables and our user-centered design process to optimize compatibility with any lean, agile, or scrum environment that we become embedded in.

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.