I am an impact-driven qualitative researcher and strategist based in Long Beach, CA. I currently lead the UXR team for Expunge Assist, a project of the civic tech group, Hack for LA.  Expunge Assist builds digital solutions to help Californians with arrest and conviction histories clear past criminal records.

Trained as an ethnographer, I love diving into complex problems which require systems-level thinking as well as attunement to detail. My expertise is generating actionable insights from messy data, and drawing meaningful connections from the richness of human stories. These stories include my own family's, which I shared with the New York Times' The Daily.

Before pivoting to civic tech, I spent nearly a decade as a professor of socio-cultural anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. There, I trained students across all levels (undergraduate, masters, doctoral) in the social sciences and humanities in the classroom and through one-on-one mentorship.

After receiving my Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, I was a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. 

Outside of work, I like cooking (and eating), libraries, and podcasts on politics and the economy.