About
I’m a Principal UX Researcher based in Denver, Colorado. My work is foundational — I go into ambiguous problem spaces, understand how people actually experience complex systems, and produce the durable artifacts that product organizations build against across planning cycles: archetypes, mental models, behavioral frameworks, journey maps.
The deliverables don’t just answer the immediate research question. They become the shared vocabulary.
How I got here
Before I was a researcher, I was a film student. Not because I wanted to make movies — though I did that briefly, in Los Angeles — but because film theory gave me a precise vocabulary for how people construct meaning from sensory experience. That turned out to be the most useful thing I’ve ever studied.
From there: music composition, physical anthropology, social science, data structures, Japanese history. An undergraduate degree at CU Boulder. A master’s at Georgia Tech bridging computer science, engineering psychology, and the study of culture and technology — including two years as a research assistant to Janet Murray on the Casablanca Digital Critical Edition, a project supported by the American Film Institute, Warner Bros., and the National Endowment for the Humanities that linked DVD playback to a growing online archive of scholarly commentary and production history, exploring user-generated content before it became mainstream— and a summer at Kodak building working Flash prototypes that ran directly on camera hardware and running in-person usability studies to test new text-input and navigation flows. A PhD at Simon Fraser University in Interactive Arts and Technology, punctuated by a summer at Samsung’s innovation lab building Arduino-based ambient displays that translated social media activity into physical, glanceable signals — while my dissertation examined how skilled movers translate visual experience into embodied expression — what meaning-making looks like when it happens through the body rather than through language.
That formation — film theory, movement analysis, cultural history, physical anthropology — trained a way of reading human behavior that I’d describe as perceptual rather than procedural. I’m not looking for patterns in click data. I’m looking for what people’s actions reveal about what they’re actually trying to accomplish.
The work
At Scotiabank, that meant spending time in people’s homes — 20 in-home interviews across four Canadian cities — watching how insurance actually enters a family’s life. The kitchen table conversations, the paperwork, the moments of anxiety and relief. That fieldwork produced the Behavioural Framework for Insurance: three customer archetypes with 360° journey maps that became the strategic foundation for the division’s digital transformation.
At PagerDuty, it meant building a research function from scratch across a multi-product operations platform serving 1.3M+ users. Over six years, I led foundational research that identified four distinct user archetypes — Responders, Managers, Administrators, Stakeholders — that resolved conflicting mental models across product areas and became the shared vocabulary for multi-quarter planning. I drove a global navigation redesign through progressive mixed methods: card sorting, concept testing, tree testing, a 15,000-user A/B test. The research influenced $2.3M in ARR. I also built the infrastructure that made ongoing research sustainable: a 1,500+ participant panel, an insights repository, continuous feedback programs that increased NPS verbatim volume 24x.
Currently, I’m embedded at Chick-fil-A through CGI Consulting, leading generative discovery research supporting a 2030 vision initiative across 3,000+ franchise locations.
Outside work
My wife, two kids, two cats, one dog, and a fish-shaped gap in the family where a fish used to be. I play drums. I paint. I read hard sci-fi and ski when the snow cooperates.
Looking for
I’m currently open to Principal, Staff, and Director-level UX research roles — particularly in organizations where research is foundational to product strategy, not a downstream validation step.