About me
I am a native of Chicago and currently live here with my wife, my son, and my two cats. I am fascinated by technology and art work, building my first computer at the age of 10 and attending art camp as a child instead of going to overnight camp (I wasn't that cool). I love video games, cats, building and fixing electronics, and reading science fiction.
My Story
My journey into UX was not a direct one. I originally majored in Chinese and lived in China for several years, with the goal of brokering business deals between Chinese and American companies. When I returned to the U.S., I realized I wanted a career that was constantly evolving and involved research.
That's when I got my first opportunity at a paper recycling company in downtown Chicago. The company wanted to go paperless, and I was tasked with making it happen. In 2016, I began working with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), a form of machine learning we now refer to as AI. My task was to scrape data from physical documents and import it into our digital record-keeping system. The CEO of the software company even told me it "would never work," but I got it done. I built a front-end system to confirm the scraped data was correct and created workflows for our operations team to make corrections. I was hooked.
This experience led me to pursue a Master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in 2018. I began leading research initiatives at the paper company, conducting usability testing, and finding new ways to improve our systems. My colleagues quickly saw that my true calling was in UX, and I haven't looked back since.
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