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Highlights of Current Work

I'm now working as a User Experience Researcher at Google in Mountain View, CA. I have the pleasure of working with the Google Checkout team and with some Maps/Earth projects. Previously I've worked with Books and Picasa, among others.

Participant, presenter and session chair at the Taxonomic Databases Working Group annual meeting in St. Louis, MO, at the Missouri Botanic Gardens, October 15-21, 2006.

Participant and presenter at the Natural Science Collections Alliance workshop on digitizing natural history collections, Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, September 8-9, 2006.

Co-instructor for the Jepson Herbarium's Tree Thinking for Educators workshop. March 2006.

Presentation and Attendance at TDWG meetings, St. Petersburg, Russia. September 2005.

Teaching with a Visual Tree of Life - Needs assessment and evaluation of three approaches to visualizing evolutionary relationships for use in the classroom. May 2005.

Book review for New Scientist magazine about Assembling The Tree of Life. March 2005

Visualizing the Tree of Life - An attempt to describe the current state of the art in tree visualization, and describe how best to share the outcomes of this incredible NSF initiative with educators and everyone. January 2005.

Envisioning iFlix - a final project for SIMS 246, Multimedia Information. This novel application provides an interface for creating and organizing video content summaries, and positions itself as a member of Apple's iLife application suite. Documents cover interaction design, interface design,functionality descriptions and user feedback. December 2004.

Recipient of NSF grant award to support student attendance at the Taxonomic Database Working Group meetings in Christchurch, New Zealand, October 2004.

Interaction design during Verified Voting's code sprint towards a web application for reporting election irregularities. September 2004.

Designing Ideal interfaces to Natural History Collections Databases - a project with the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and the Berkeley Natural History Museums. August 2004.

The MaNIS Interface Design project - a team project for SIMS 213, User Interface Design and Development. We designed and prototyped an easy website search interface to a network of databases of mammal specimen metadata. May 2004.

Visualizations for Phylogenetics - a final project for SIMS 247, Information Visualization. An exploration of what parallel coordinates visualization can contribute to the science of making phylogenies. May 2004.

Brief Career Bio

  • Masters in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley (Graduating in 2005); emphasis on technology needs assessment and user centered design of interactions, interfaces, and systems.
  • 7 years experience in education at science museums: The Franklin Institute, The Lawrence Hall of Science.
  • 4 years multimedia software and website production management at ScienceVIEW, LHS.
  • 4 Neotropical biological survey expeditions: Guyana, Belize, Brazil (twice) resulting in 8 scientific publications and assorted other writings .
  • Bachelors in Ecology & Environmental Science at Bryn Mawr College, 1997.