About Me

Usable for whom?

I’ve spent the last 8+ years chasing one question: who gets left out when we design for “the average user”? That question has taken me from studying how older adults navigate password managers to driving UX research efforts at the University of Virginia — and it still shapes every project I take on.

What I do

  • Drive end-to-end UX research: interviews, usability testing, heuristic evaluation, surveys, ethnography, card sorting, A/B testing.
  • Translate research into design and infrastructure decisions beyond insight reports.
  • Evaluate third-party vendors and tools through structured usability and QA testing.
  • Teach and mentor: I’ve lectured graduate-level human-centered design courses, supervised interns, and mentored capstone and thesis projects.
  • Publish and peer-review: 5 publications (216 citations) in venues including USENIX Security, CHI, and PETS; reviewer for CHI, INTERACT, CSCW, ASSETS, and IJHCS

Background

Ph.D. and M.S. in Human-Centered Computing, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (GPA 4.0), and an M.S. in Computer Science from Clemson University. My doctoral and research assistant work focused on privacy and usability among older adults, teenagers, and individuals with disabilities. I’ve also taught as an Adjunct Professor at UMBC, lecturing a graduate course in Human-Centered Design.

Recognition

  • Program Committee Member & Lead Reviewer, ASSETS Conference (2026)
  • UVA Staff Rewards and Recognition Award (2024)
  • Conference speaker: HigherEdWeb, Three-Minute Thesis, iConference Doctoral Colloquium
  • Peer reviewer across 6 venues, 12+ reviews completed

A bit more personally

My research keeps circling back to one question: who gets left out when we design for “the average user”? Older adults, people with disabilities, people navigating tools that assume more comfort with technology than they have. That’s who I build my research around, and it has shaped how I think about design generally: usability isn’t one-size-fits-all, and the gaps are usually where the most interesting problems live.

Outside of work, I spend a lot of time drawing, dabbling in animation, and playing video games. I’ve never been especially socially adept, but I’ve always been drawn to watching people, figuring out what makes them tick, what they’re drawn to, what confuses them. Looking back, that’s probably not so different from what I do professionally; I just get to ask people directly now, instead of just watching from a distance.