I specialize in making learning more accessible, visual, interactive, contextual, and delightful through the integration of design, engineering, and creative technology. My passion lies in making invisible concepts visible through innovative design, research, and technology approaches.
My career began in sustainable design before my doctoral research at Cambridge on high-performing innovation teams led me to pivot my design firm toward data-driven product and user experience design, learning design, and creative technology collaboration.
My work has appeared in Kinfolk, MIT Museum, Museum of Science, Thinkers50, Forbes, Boston Magazine, Harvard Business Review, and numerous global outlets. I've developed design projects with organizations including Kering, Uber, Piaggio, General Mills, MIT, Harvard, Brown and RISD, City of Boston, City of Cape Town, FIFA, Swarovski, Microsoft, Disney, Expedia, and many others.
Since 2021, I've directed the joint Master of Arts in Design Engineering (MADE) Program at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design. My academic background includes a Ph.D. from Cambridge, Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT, Visiting Scholar role at Stanford, and 10 years at Harvard's engineering faculty where I co-created multidisciplinary design and engineering courses and programs across Harvard's engineering, design and business schools.
I'm currently working on a book about flavor fluency and expert intuition development. From tasting competitions to collaborations with farmers, food scientists, chefs, and technologists, I study how experts learn to read flavor like musicians read music—a skill that deepens and integrates their understanding of food, land, climate, and culture. This book explores how and why we might make this remarkable ability easier for everyone to learn. This work builds on the Chef League research game I built in 2019 using NLP and machine learning to teach flavor composition based on professional chef data.
More broadly, I'm interested in combining data and design to either increase enjoyment or decrease drudgery. Example recent projects I've consulted on include an AI grant-writing co-pilot and a project that helps people think differently about time left to do the things they enjoy over the course of a lifetime.
