About me
I’m a product designer and design leader in Washington, DC, with fourteen years in design research and twelve in product design. I design AI decision-support tools for government and defense. Most recently that has meant work for the Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and AI Office and the U.S. Department of State — embedded with mission stakeholders, turning ambiguous, high-stakes requirements into workflows that actually ship.
My work tends to live where complexity is unavoidable: data-dense analytical interfaces, map-based field operations, case management and risk vetting, and the newer problem of how people calibrate trust in what a model tells them. I care a great deal about explainability, source visibility, and how a system communicates uncertainty — including when it should decline to answer at all.
I’m hands-on in code. I build and ship front-end and AI systems rather than handing off static mockups — Angular, Ant Design, HTML5/CSS, Python, and a published npm package — which lets me work in the codebase alongside engineers and keep what ships faithful to the design intent.
Outside of client work I design and build agentic AI systems: a local-first multi-agent conversational platform with persistent memory, tool integrations and voice, and Sostenuto, an open-source, model-agnostic memory layer for AI agents. Owning prompt architecture and model evaluation across Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and open-weight models has taught me things about human–AI interaction I could not have learned from the design side alone.
This is less of a pivot than it may look. My research training was U.S. Air Force–funded work on human-automation trust — how operators calibrate reliance on automation under uncertainty, in multi-UAV supervisory control. More than a decade later, it is the same question, with far better models.
Before this, I spent five years as Senior UX Manager at the National Student Clearinghouse, an organization serving 97% of U.S. higher education institutions. I built an enterprise design system from the ground up and drove its adoption across eleven independent development teams — cutting redundancy and time to market by 60% and contributing an estimated $1.8M in efficiency savings, which gave designers back time for the strategic work. Earlier: smart-meter field operations at Hubbell, and government and commercial programs at MetroStar. Since 2011 I’ve worked with clients across healthcare, education, utilities, government agencies and non-profit organizations.
I hold an M.A. in Human Factors and Applied Cognition from George Mason University, an M.A. in Communications from Peking University, and a B.A. in English from Beijing International Studies University. I hold an active Top Secret clearance.
My academic background, my interests across the social sciences, humanities and behavioral sciences, and the experience of living in different cultures gave me different perspectives for understanding the world — and the ability to empathize with people.
I gravitate toward design challenges that enhance human capability, support self-expression, and build meaningful connections.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Good product design does exactly that — it evokes positive feelings in the people who use it. That is the design philosophy I strive to live by.