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Resume

Work
Experience

2022 - Present

Code for America
Sr. Director of Experience Insights

Building a mixed-methods insights discipline with qualitative UX researchers and data scientists. Driving Code for America's AI strategy with cross-functional partners across the org in partnership with C-level and senior leadership. 

Director of Qualitative Research

Enabling and growing a team of qualitative UX researchers working to improve government in meaningful ways.

2019 - 2022

Spotify
Senior Research Manager
Manager, Research

Lead the HCI Research Lab at Spotify and established a human-computer interaction research through design practice focused on interactive prototyping of personalized machine-learning based experiences. Our prototypes acted as early-stage proof-of-concepts of two Spotify products launched in 2021 and one launched in 2022. Our team contributed to the Spotify innovation pipeline by filing 27 patents (12 granted) and publishing 15 scientific papers.

2018 - 2019

Spotify
Senior Research Scientist

Served as team lead of a cross-functional group focused on Spotify Search feature metrics. Developed metrics on success and effort based on mixed-methods quantitative data analysis and qualitative user research. Successful alignment and tech transfer with Search Product teams led to a productionized version of the proposed success metric.

2016 - 2018

Spotify
Senior User Researcher

Hired as the lead IC researcher to bootstrap a 1st party mobile voice search feature (launched in 2017). Collected training data for NLU models, developed accuracy and error metrics for voice fulfillment, evaluated the UX through qualitative and quantitative methods, and tracked feature sentiment through social media posts and user surveys.

2013 - 2016

Amazon Alexa
Research Scientist
Quantitative User Researcher

Collaborate with product, software and research teams to design and deploy innovative quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques to extend the capabilities of the Alexa assistant across diverse product categories. Drive research program to provide frictionless customer interactions with the Echo by improving the quality of the data used to train speech recognition models. Developed and drove a crowdsourcing research program to allow the Amazon Echo to add more than 20 new features in its first year of launch.

2010 - 2013

IBM Research
Research Scientist
Postdoctoral Researcher

Analyzed geographic and cultural differences in the adoption of social networking services and social software within IBM. Focused on improving the consumption experience of social media content by multilingual readers.

Education

Cornell University | Ph.D

My dissertation focused on how people in Wikipedia and social tagging systems express territorial behavior during collaboration. I used mixed methods ranging from log analysis, statistical modeling and qualitative user interviews to understand social behavior. 

Cornell University | B.S.

Skills, Expertise
& Press 

  • Hiring and building diverse, high-performing cross-functional teams

  • Facilitating design workshops and sprints

  • Qualitative methods include interviews, ethnography, high and low fidelity probes

  • Survey experience with Qualtrics, crowdsourcing with Amazon Mechanical Turk and Appen

  • Languages: SQL, R, Python for statistical analysis

  • User research tools such as UserTesting, Reduct, Airtable, DScout

  • Analytics tools such as Google Data Studio, Tableau

  • Press coverage in Popular Science, Ars Technica, Vice Media, Wired, Fast Company, ABC News, The Atlantic

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