Work Experience

  • Digital Product Manager, 2018-2021

    As a Product Manager for NBC Owned Television Stations, I worked with designers, engineers, and editorial and business stakeholders to ship web products for 35 NBC/Telemundo local news websites and their platforms. During my time there, I helped lead an overhaul redesign and CMS migration, where I focused on off-platform and distribution tools. I also helmed the design, launch, and site maintenance for a new livestream and video-focused media brand called LX. My purview spanned editorial/ad creative tools, newsletters, voice/audio products, frontend reader experiences, backend CMS logic, and more.

  • Product Owner, 2017-2018

    I managed the development and maintenance of the public-facing marketing sites for 14+ Anthem brands. I managed a scrum team of content admins and developers. We practiced a scaled agile development methodology called SAFe.

  • Product Manager, 2015-2017

    Sonr News is a media-tech startup whose primary offering is a dashboard tool for social media search, monitoring, and trend analysis. Using natural language processing (NLP) and other AI, we surfaced breaking news and trends for journalists and content creators. I joined the team early as a Product Manager but wore many hats to help bring a brand new product from research & conception to market. Acquired by Audioboom (2017).

  • Editorial Director, 2014-2015

    I was in charge of marketing, social media, and publishing operations for Experiment, a YC-backed crowdfunding platform for scientific research in San Francisco, CA. I focused on building a new, open science publishing platform that was a hybrid of science storytelling and traditional science publishing.

  • Social Media & Community Editor

    Social Media & Community Editor - Science, Green, and Tech

    Assistant Science Editor

    I served in a series of editorial roles on the vertical side, as well as on the social media/community teams. Over the course of my tenure I helped launch the Science vertical, wrote and edited a wide range of content, managed HuffPost's primary social accounts with a combined 10M+ audience, contributed to developing social strategy for 30+ verticals, and led social 101 and 202 trainings. I also founded and directed HuffPost's Girls In STEM Mentorship Program that matched over 500 girls with mentors in STEM fields.

  • Editorial Intern, Summer 2011

    I pitched and published popular psychology articles for print and web. I also managed bloggers and their posts. I published a personal blog called The Stone Age Mind about evolutionary psychology research.

Skills Summary

 

  • product and project management

  • user research/UX design

  • science/tech reporting and editing

  • breaking news & newsgathering

  • editorial packaging

  • audience development

  • design-thinking

  • lean/agile and scaled-agile methodologies

  • User Research

    Mapping the findings from extensive newsroom user research. You can read more about my findings here.

  • Speaking

    I often speak to groups about science journalism and media innovation. I've also spoken at a number of women in STEM events about alternative science careers, diversity in STEM, and the importance of STEM mentorship. Here’s a presentation I gave at NYU's Ada Lovelace Day, their annual event for celebrating women in STEM.

  • Women Futurists Collective

    In 2015, I founded a community and visibility platform for women futurists — for anyone who enjoys reading about, discussing, and building emerging technology. The group includes over 500 women scientists, engineers, artists, entrepreneurs, activists, and students engaged in thoughtful conversations around what's to come. We host regular meet-ups all over the country and publish a digital zine called On The Future.

  • Love in the Time of Cyborgs

    A GIF from the fundraising video for Love in the Time of Cyborgs, a crowdfunded journalism project on the future of technology and human evolution. I raised $1,000 and received recurring monthly donations from 30 readers.

  • SONR News

    An early SONR dashboard prototype.

  • Will VR Make Us Better Humans?

    I was asked to write and design a mobile-first, interactive story for Hardbound, an app that aimed to redesign storytelling for mobile. Hardbound closed, but I loved the opportunity to experiment with a nontraditional form of journalism.

  • User Personas

    Putting together user personas in Trello helped our team at SONR maintain a user-centered approach to product design.

  • SONR Trend Monitoring AI

    A prototype for SONR's NLP-based clustering algorithm to surface keyword/phrase trends on social media.

Education

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

My academic background is in evolutionary biology, psychology, and neuroscience. That means I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the large-scale systems that drive the natural world, and how they extend to the technology we’re building. I’m a fan of the scientific method, design thinking, and first-principles thinking as approaches to problem-solving and experience design.

  • B.A. Psychology and Biology, with a focus on Evolutionary Studies

  • Carolina Research Scholar

  • Worked as a Research Assistant in the lab for Barbara Frederickson, the world’s leading scholar in the field of positive psychology and emotions

Parsons New School for Design

  • Summer 2010 Fashion Design & Drawing program in New York, NY

Awards/Press

NESCent Journalism Fellowship - Duke University

I was awarded a grant to work with scientists and experts on a writing project exploring evolutionary psychology and transhumanism. NESCent is an NSF-funded evolutionary research center in Durham, NC.

NASW Science Writing Fellowship

I received a grant from the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) to cover the 2011 AAAS Annual Meeting, the largest scientific meeting in the world.

Other Recognition

  • An article I wrote for Quartz, The Future of AI is Female, went viral on social media, and was picked up by many outlets, including MIT Tech Review

  • I was invited as a guest on the 60dB podcast to discuss my piece in The Atlantic on dissociation and VR. We chatted about virtual reality, psychedelics, existential dread, and my zombie-slashing skills

  • Global Investigative Journalism Network included my newsroom research report in their list of top stories of 2016

  • Featured in Leading Thought's 20 Women Futurists on the Future of Education

  • Invited to give the keynote presentation to Ciencia en Redes, a science communication conference in Madrid, Spain