Professional Skills

  • Thought leadership for Conversational UX teams: tools, processes, strategizing, protocols, Best Practices

  • Design Thinking: seeing both “big-picture” and the puzzle pieces

  • Experienced, effective remote worker

  • Adept, articulate speaker and presenter
    (former professional actor / voice actor singer)

  • Highly creative, innovative thinker
    (“How would we do this if anything were possible?!”)

  • Skilled user researcher, always user-focused

  • Process improvement advocate

  • Familiar with, and experienced in, a wide variety of project methodologies (Agile, Waterfall, Hybrid, and others)

  • Experienced with LLM and RAG models of Conversational AI

Downloadable PDF version

Design Skills

  • Certified in Design Thinking, experienced in Stanford, IDEO, and conventional “Double Diamond” models

  • Branding, Persona, and “Grice Maxim Model” conversation design

  • Comfortable, collaborative, and effective design team lead

  • Experienced and effective teacher and mentor
    (—and I genuinely enjoy it!)

  • Experience across multiple modalities
    (Voice-only, voice-forward, text, chatbot, Visual IVR)

  • Conversational AI

  • Broad conversation design experience in multiple verticals
    (Finance, Healthcare, Travel / Hospitality, Entertainment, Transportation,Transit, Utilities)

“You Just Never Know…” Skills

  • Conversation Data Analysis, heuristic evaluation, qualitative research

  • Former professional actor, voice actor, singer (opera / musical theatre) and instrumentalist (piano, tuba, trombone, bassoon)

  • Published and performed composer / arranger

  • Dual-citizen (Canada / USA), can travel

  • Intermediate-level Spanish (speak, read, write)

  • Beginning-level Irish (speak, read)

Experience

Sabbatical | Independent Work (2025 - Present)
Remote [Seattle, WA]

  • Writing a forthcoming AI-consumer-focused book on the caveats and pitfalls inherent to Conversational AI — drawing on over a decade of hands-on design experience across enterprise, government, healthcare, and general consumer-facing domains

  • Continued refinement of Conversation Design methodology, tools, and portfolio

Principal Conversation Strategist (2022 - 2025)
Blink UX / Mphasis, Inc., Remote [Seattle, WA]

  • Provide Conversational Strategy and Design consulting services to clients using industry-leading Conversational AI bot-building tool

  • Spearhead conversational design efforts for leading American financial services firm (multi-year, $1M+ project)

  • Advanced conversation design, prompt engineering, and audio-output prosody tuning using Advanced SSML

  • Mentor and train junior designers, provide peer review and editing, train end-user customers on the Kore AI tool suite

  • Create and implement new, fully functional Conversation Strategy practice, including tools, processes, protocols, Best Practices, templates, pre-sales materials, and AI guidelines

  • Design large language model–driven solutions that leverage fine-tuned and retrieval-based architectures.
    This requires a strong understanding of how ML models learn, generalize, and fail—using this knowledge to bridge technical and business stakeholders in defining scalable AI strategies.

  • Sales and Pre-sales consultation (to clients in tandem with in-house sales leadership), to advise and consult on obtaining an optimal balance of speed, quality, and cost for the client, using proprietary project-estimating tools I designed and created specifically for this use.

Senior Voice User Experience Designer (2021 - 2022)
Optum Rx / United Health Group, Remote [Seattle, WA]

  • Create, implement, and lead a newly established Conversation Design practice for a Fortune 5 company’s mail-order pharmacy business.

    • Reduced transfers to agent by 17%

  • Design conversational interfaces across multiple modalities (Voice, SMS, Visual IVR, Web)

  • Mentor junior designers, train and educate co-workers on Conversation Design Best Practices, establish Design process, protocol, and methods

Education & Training

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA — Professional Certificate in Design Thinking
Saybrook University, Pasadena, CA — Ph.D, Psychology of Creativity (All But Dissertation)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY — M.S., Human-Computer Interaction
University of California, Santa Cruz, CA — Professional Certificate in Management of Technical Information
Seattle Pacific University — Additional non-degree graduate study in Learning Psychology
Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA —B.A. Ed., (Majors: Music, Theatre, Spanish)