Outside of research, I stretch my scope and experiment
with new projects. Here are some of those side quests! 🤺
Led an Award-Winning Research Mentorship Program
Mentorship has always been important to me - I feel lucky to have had wonderful mentors like Scott Kincaid, Susan Lynch, Qian Yu, Susan Verba, Tina Lee, Robin Counts, and many more.
At Salesforce, I took on additional scope in helping lead a Research Mentorship Program within our 100+ Research & Insights Team. This program aimed to matching junior and senior researchers to help foster career growth and bring connectedness to the team.
In August 2022, I was one of 14 winning teams recognized out of 351 nominations across the entire Tech & Product organization for my contribution to this program, inspiring similar programs in other orgs!
Designed Tech Solutions for Incarcerated Citizens
Throughout 2024, I've been contracting as a designer with FreeWorld, a tech-driven nonprofit empowering individuals affected by incarceration in the USA. FreeWorld aims to facilitate economic mobility for these individuals after prison, particularly through career pathways such as truck driving. So far, FreeWorld has directly impacted over 7k lives in their post-prison journey. Learn more in this video here.
As a Product Designer (I dabble in research here and there too), I help build tech solutions that empower individuals to achieve high-paying trucking jobs, making the process accessible anywhere in the US. I'm currently working on a new 0->1 product to be launched in 2025.
Co-founded a 500+ Design Community on Campus
One of the things I'm most proud of is building the first interaction design community at UC Davis, Design Interactive. Three design friends and I had seen a pressing need on campus for human-centered design and UX opportunities given the growing number of students venturing into this field. Given that this problem hadn't been solved by anyone, we decided to do something about it!
In 2020, our first semester started with 25 members. Now, the organization has grown to over 500+ students involved over time, democratized access to design for students of all backgrounds, is one of the largest organizations on campus, and has brought community to like-minded UX students. Read more about DI's impact on Instagram.
Ongoing Human-Computer Interaction Research
At UC Berkeley's School of Information, ongoing work. Coming soon
Research-in-flight #1: Unpacking the impacts of user interface design on perceptions of LLM model reliability, explainability, and interpretability (Capstone Project)
Research-in-flight #2: Evaluating Expectation Violation Theory and Algorithmic Fairness in the context of San Francisco Unified School District's School Assignment Algorithm (in collab. with SFUSD)
