realtalk@MIT Instructional Designer and Program Manager

"Before coming to MIT, I spent 10 years as a public school teacher, an experience that grounds everything I build. With more than 15 years across public education, project-based learning, and global partnerships, I've collaborated with MIT faculty and educators around the world to design professional development ecosystems and hands-on coaching models that elevate teacher confidence and student voice. I'm most energized by creating experiences where people slow down, listen differently, and discover something new about themselves—or each other." 

Principal Research Scientist

"I worked a ton with focus groups...butI could see firsthand what were the limitations of that approach. So I think that helped me really defined very clearly how our approach at C3 is very different from the transactional nature of focus groups. So I brought a lot of my deep knowledge in ethnographic research, participatory research, focus groups, qualitative analysis. And in a way, I feel that I reinvented these skills in the context of what we do at C3. So I still feel that my work is grounded in all of the work that I've done these past years, but in such a new, a refreshing way."

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Research Designer

"Before I came to C3, I was working as a voice designer at a company doing speech recognition....it was an interesting type of design because it was a technology that needed shape...what is voice interface design? And it was cool to be able to get in on defining what that kind of future could be. And so that was a good precursor to my work here because I feel like we're also still working with audio, still working with voice, and still trying define what a space is...And we're kind of doing a similar thing here, but now human to human, which is so much more my area, so much more what I'm interested in, what I think technology should do."

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realtalk@MIT Technology Specialist

"Being here has a lot of the same kind of spirit of, like, build stuff, try it out, move, move fast, but not so much like move fast and break things, which tends to be the kind of tech model. So kind of having that layer of community consciousness where my job now with the realtalk project is really to think about, like, what should our data governance look like? How do we get students or people to engage, but also feel it's trustworthy? So that's kind of what I'm excited about." 

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Prototype Engineer

"Way before this I was in digital marketing. I worked in that for four years, roughly, mostly doing paid ads on social media, and I loved working with the data, so I started teaching myself to code a little bit to visualize it and try to kind of convey what was happening to people who didn't understand how paid ads work. And then I decided I wanted to do something more...So I looked around at grad programs, I studied computer science and public policy, and then moved into the software engineering space. I've done sort of consultancy type work on projects for different nonprofits, and then right before this I was working on a bioreactor software."

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Prototype Manager

"I was at first a manufacturing engineer writing in my free time freelance, and then I moved into museum production work and began prototyping interactive hardware, and then eventually moved into some software development and management projects, one of which was like an interactive planetarium, which is in Iowa."

realtalk@MIT Program Lead

"Before I was working here at MIT, I was working in a huge variety of psychology, social work research spaces...But what I liked was the methods. Anytime we got to do codesign, anytime we got to actually work with the people who'd be affected to make sure what we're making is useful and can translate to the real world. So I guess it makes sense that, that I'm here in translational research and with realtalk@MIT. Then I officially became a social worker, got my degree, and started looking for places that did behavior change, did community level behavior change. I did that with technology in an interesting and meaningful and ethical way. So that's what brought me here."