About Me..

This photo was taken on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland when meeting my cousins there for the first time.

I think about big opportunities — but I also like to dig into details to make those opportunities real. In my downtime, I’m usually reading, working on puzzles, playing board games, listening to music, or learning something new. Lately that’s painting and podcasts on history, economics, and psychology.

I am a system designer who loves to create interdisciplinary convergence – I believe we can do great things when diverse minds come together.

From 2019-2022, I was a postdoctoral fellow and systems innovation design lead at the University of Colorado Denver’s interdisciplinary Comcast Media and Technology Center. At the CMTC and CU Denver, I led and managed design projects; mentored over a dozen outstanding undergraduates in multiple engineering, arts, media, and computing disciplines as part of a professional design innovation team; innovated and facilitate design workshops; and conducted interdisciplinary research. I was also an instructor for CU Denver’s new first-year Design Innovation Fundamentals course for students in engineering, design, and computing.

In 2019, I earned my PhD in Design Science from the University of Michigan.

Design Science is an interdisciplinary degree program that blends social science and engineering methods to study how people design. My dissertation is about coordination activity that occurs during the design of large-scale and complex engineered systems. I worked with researchers in the department of Mechanical Engineering, the School of Information, and the division of Integrative Systems and Design at Michigan on several projects and have been part of the teaching staff for two Design Science courses.

In 2017, I was a summer policy analysis associate at the RAND Corporation. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to spend 12 weeks at the RAND Corporation as part of the Graduate Student Summer Associate Program, working with a multidisciplinary research team.

In 2015, I graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in Aerospace Engineering, and I graduated from the University of Alabama in Huntsville with a degree in Operations Research.

My program of study in operations research focused on systems modeling and analysis tools, as well as minor subject areas of systems engineering and statistics.

At Maryland, my research focus was on dynamic force measurement techniques applicable in a hypersonic wind tunnel. I worked jointly with faculty at Maryland and personnel at the Air Force’s Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) as part of the Air Force – UMD Hypersonic Center of Testing Excellence. I was also a teaching assistant for two core undergraduate aerospace engineering courses.

In 2011, I graduated from Caltech with a degree in Chemistry. At Caltech I studied physical chemistry, applied physics, and materials science. My undergraduate research was under the applied physics department, focusing on the design and development of novel solid-state and polymeric solar cells.