Learning sciences researcher and designer.

I am a learning sciences researcher, learning designer, and UX researcher. I build things that help people learn, and I study how real people actually use them. My work sits where qualitative research, progressive pedagogy, and hands-on making meet.

One idea runs through all of it. A learner does not store content, a learner remakes it. That view comes from Dewey and Vygotsky: understanding gets built in the doing, shaped by the people and culture around the learner. So I design for agency. I would rather hand a student a real task and watch them make it their own than hand them a worksheet and check whether they filled it in.

My research circles one question, how understanding gets built. I used clinical interviews to watch young readers make meaning from an unfamiliar story. I followed women in gaming to see how they protect a sense of self inside a niche culture. I taught a single story two ways, as a textbook and as a comedy podcast, to measure what survived the change in medium. These are the methods of UX research: interviews, observation, and usability testing, aimed at how people think rather than what they say they think. Each study became a set of interactive artifacts, because research no one can use is only half finished.

I work with AI as a practitioner. From 2019 to 2022 I evaluated pre-release tools from OpenAI and Google through a curricular and psychological lens, designing tests inside live classrooms and reporting what worked before those tools reached the public. I bring that same skeptical curiosity to new tools now, testing them against real learning problems instead of trusting the hype.

Underneath it all is a maker. I have written plays and a young-adult novel, painted murals across Chicago, published zines, and staged educational theater. That creative practice is not a hobby beside the research. It is the same instinct: turn an idea into something a person can step inside.

I create what is immediate and useful, designing and adapting research for applicable, genuine human use.