I’m glad you’re here. Please browse this site to check out my professional work and contributions to the fields of education and design.

But first, a little about me…

I am an educational designer and an international leader in leveraging the power of design to drive change in the K-12 education system. I am also an expert in using the design process and maker-based instruction to create student-centered learning experiences that develop students’ creative confidence, optimism, and problem-solving skills. I have led design teams to tackle diverse projects such as reimagining a PreK-12 school schedule and the use of time as an instructional tool. I have also redesigned an accreditation process to yield deeper insights into the state of schools in relation to their strategic plan and mission. I have coached school leaders, educators, non-profit leaders and corporate executives to develop their design mindsets and the capacity to leverage design to drive innovation.

I began my career as a secondary teacher and co-founder of a small, experimental independent school, where students collaborated across age groups to engage in project-based, interdisciplinary learning. I have since helped scale a national education non-profit start-up called the Spark Program, helped develop the K12 Lab at the Hasso Plattner Institute for Design at Stanford University (“the d.school”), and directed a collegiate makerspace called the Deason Innovation Gym. I am also the founding director of the Maker Education Project at Southern Methodist University, an initiative dedicated to catalyzing transformational maker-based learning experiences for students in K–12 schools.

I draw from my experiences in a wide array of settings to develop and scale educational programming that matches my deep belief in the power of hands-on, real-world learning to inspire students to solve complex problems and feel empowered to make the world a better place. I currently teach at the School of Business at Portland State University.

Lately, my work has focused on leveraging Human-Centered Design to improve outcomes for marginalized groups. These social impact design projects include reimagining the discipline process for a large urban school district, designing interventions to create healthy and safe voting opportunities in the U.S. presidential election, addressing racial bias in the licensing process for childcare facilities and supporting women micro-entrepreneurs in rural Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.    

I currently serve as the Aga Khan Foundation’s Global Innovation & Design Advisor. My portfolio of social impact projects in this role spans multiple modes of design work and design education: from creating resources for communities to run Human-Centered Design sprints, to designing and running trainings that build capacity in professionals, to leading teams through intensive design projects. 

I am an educator by training, a maker by trial and error, a learning experience designer and a steadfast believer in the power of empathy to bring compassionate solutions to the messiest of human problems. Over the course of my career, I have realized that through designing and building and experimenting and hacking at the education system, I have developed the design and maker mindsets needed to tackle any challenge and tinker away at any problem, no matter how seemingly intractable. I believe that training both young people and adults with tools to develop creative confidence is the key to large-scale transformation of the inequitable systems.