My role

I’m a user researcher focused on helping teams explore, understand, and prioritize the needs of their users. I have end-to-end experience with all aspects of user research across education, start ups, e-commerce, and both B2B and B2C products.  

Background

I started my professional career as an elementary school teacher grounded in both understanding and meeting my students’ academic and emotional needs. As a teacher, I had the chance to design learning experiences that kept my students engaged and often had to adapt those experiences – even in the moment – to ensure that I was supporting all of my students. This was my first glimpse into exploring and adapting to user needs; in this case, it was the needs of six and seven year olds. 

After four years of teaching, I went to graduate school to get my Master’s of Education in Human Development and Psychology. I wanted to better understand how to make learning — and particularly technology — experiences match user needs. During that time, I was able to refine both my quantitative and qualitative research skills through coursework, graduate research assistantships, and internships. I fell in love with tackling new questions, conducting research, and collaboratively developing impactful solutions. All of which I’ve gotten to do across multiple products and teams after working for over five years in the education technology space.

I’m now focused on partnering with teams that want to both better understand their users and also design digital experiences that meet those users’ needs. It’s basically the work that I was doing with my students years ago but at a much larger scale.

Personal interests

Outside of my work, I might be found training for another marathon, wandering the parks of Brooklyn with my dog, reading a new book, or watching the first NBA game that’s on Tuesday or Thursday nights (typically can't stay awake long enough for the second game).