Education
In 2015, I graduated from University of Washington with a B.S. in Honors Psychology and a B.S. in Public Health. After taking a gap year to work, I moved to Rhode Island to be a PhD student in Brown University's Behavioral and Social Health Sciences program. There, I realized that the program wasn't a fit for my interests and decided that I ultimately wanted to pursue a career in UX Research and Design instead so I left the program to join University of Washington's Master’s program in Human Centered Design and Engineering. I am currently in my second and final year, where I am working on my Master's Capstone in a team of four and taking classes in Physical Computing and Prototyping, and Interaction Design and Prototyping.
Work Experience
Prior to entering graduate school, I worked at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the third most prestigious cancer research center in the world. At Fred Hutch, I (1) published two first-authored research articles, (2) reviewed scientific manuscripts for research journals, (3) attended and presented at professional conferences, and (4) took part in developing SmartQuit 3.0, an empirically-driven quit smoking app. I also worked at Harborview Medical Center with Dr. Roger Vilardaga on Learn to Quit, an evidence-based app to help smokers with Serious Mental Illness break their nicotine addiction. In this lab, I transcribed user interviews on low-fidelity wireframes of Learn to Quit and used Thematic Analysis to identify the barriers to utilization. I also helped design prototypes and attended app development meetings. My contributions resulted in having a co-authored publication published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the leading peer-reviewed journal for digital health.
INTERESTS
In general, I am interested in helping companies design seamless and delightful user experiences. I am also interested in applying UX to evidence-based interventions that tackle major public health problems (i.e., smoking, diet, stress, depression, anxiety, and lack of physical activity). Additionally, I am interested in what makes people engage in mobile-based interventions and how to utilize data-driven indicators of adherence and motivational design techniques to help people build healthy habits. By combining the fields of Cognitive, Clinical, and Social Psychology with user-centered design and public health research, I believe we could develop innovative solutions to difficult problems!