In 2011, I completed a MS in Design from Stanford (d.school) lead by IDEO co-founder David Kelley. To get to that point, however, was a circuitous path leading from my undergraduate years studying ecology and evolutionary biology, to a formative career in corporate finance, evolving into marketing, entrepreneurship and product development. This varied background affords me the ability to work across disciplines and scales, informed by a systems approach and a keen strategic sensibility.

While at Stanford, I was awarded two major grants, served as coordinator of the David H. Liu Lecture Series in Design, co-founded the Imaginary Labs geodesic structure research center and co-taught Design History with Barry Katz at the California College of the Arts. In conjunction with a sustainability grant, I spoke about systems design at the 2010 GE/Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Why Design Now? conference, held at The Lincoln Center in New York (video below).

For my graduate thesis, partner Laura Martini (MIT Media Lab) and I lead an interdisciplinary team of five graduate students to reinvent the museum experience through social technology and immersive experience design. 

Funded by the Stanford Initiative for Creativity and the Arts (SiCa) with support from Herman Miller, IBM and The Eames Office, our team designed and constructed a prototype exhibition to showcase our work. Featuring over one hundred artifacts from my own collection, the exhibition explored The Eames Office’s pioneering communications design work for IBM during the Golden Age of computing. Held at LUNAR in Palo Alto, it was the first public exhibition devoted to this highly influential design partnership.