A bit about me...

I never actually thought Boston would be home. I arrived here in 2005, after finishing my Master’s of Design at Carnegie Mellon. I spent the early part of my design career working at design agencies and at corporations, as a freelancer and at a startup. I worked on medical devices, commercial brand strategy, industrial safety gear, financial software, and enterprise mobile apps. In doing so, I gained a huge breadth of experience across types of organizations and types of industries; I also developed the UX design and research expertise, innovation techniques, and agile methodologies that would serve as a baseline for the rest of

After seven years, I felt that there was an opportunity for design have a greater positive impact on society. I wanted to apply the design and technology skills that I’d learned to the civic and social issues that I observed around me. So in 2012 I founded Code for Boston, a civic technology volunteer group, and built it into the largest chapter in Code for America’s Brigade network. It also set the stage for my own pivot into the public sector.

I left my job at a startup in 2014 and joined the inaugural class of Innovation Fellows at the IT department of the Massachusetts state government, where I had the privilege to work with many amazing public servants on the first statewide online application for public housing. It was a hugely humbling and hugely satisfying experience, and a crash-course introduction to building digital products and services in government with the complexities of accessibility, procurement, policy requirements, hiring, siloed data, and everything else. I loved it.

That Fellowship work helped prove the case that state government could take an iterative, human-centered, technologically-modern approach to solving constituent problems. I founded and led an internal rapid prototyping team on the 18F model called GovNext, and was later a founding member of the first state-level digital service team in Massachusetts (and one of the first in the US) where I helped lead the redesign of Mass.gov as the Director of Design & Service Innovation.

More recently, I joined the Customer Technology Team at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, first as a product manager and later as the Director of Design, where our team brings a rider-centered, data-driven approach to building digital tools for public transportation in Eastern Massachusetts.