I practice pragmatic optimism to create compassionate products, services, and experiences. Design and entrepreneurship form the center of how I connect with our core human needs and values. My passion for user experience design and web development feeds a growing interest in project management and sustainable business development.
A recent graduate of NYU Abu Dhabi’s (NYUAD) undergraduate Interactive Media program, I’ve spent the last four years pushing current and emerging technologies, building interactions through physical computing, embodied technologies (AR, VR, etc.), web development, and artificial intelligence. Additional concentrations in Psychology and Design taught me to appreciate the interconnections between our behavior, our environment, and our societies–the keys to creating meaningful experiences. My work revolves around strengthening connection and communicating complexity in readily understandable ways.
These intentions inspired my two most recent projects, the educational technology startup Ferant, and the mobile app design MyCorr. I founded Ferant in 2020 with a dear friend and his high school mentor. We worked to build a whole-school solution to personalizing education. Over two years, I contributed heavily to the company’s product design, visual identity, and project management. In the spring of 2022, I left the company to focus on other priorities, including my senior capstone project, MyCorr.
MyCorr emerged from long, semi-structured conversations I had with friends and family about the idea of allyship, which had come to the forefront of the news in 2020 as a result of the George Floyd protests and other responses to systemic injustice. These conversations provoked the idea for an app that would improve the ways we communicate boundaries when reaching out to each other. I spent four months developing the product from preliminary market and user research to a refined exhibition prototype, designed to walk people through its core features.
To pay the bills throughout this four-year adventure, I worked as an assistant in the NYUAD Wood Shop. There, I learned traditional joinery and basic carpentry from an expert woodworker in-between grabbing him tools, organizing the messes, and performing regular shop upkeep. Some of my favorite projects were installing art students’ capstone projects, building custom skateboards, and crafting fine jewelry boxes. The best moments, though, happened during new assistant training or after-hours projects, when we could share our craft and a laugh or two.
When I’m not designing, programming, or fabricating, I take deep breaths by moving. Usually this looks like cross-training powerlifting, climbing, and floreio. Sometimes it looks like buying the cheapest plane ticket I can find or backpacking through the closest wilderness. I’ve also been known to debate about Star Wars and play the not-so-occasional videogame (right now, Terraria).