About Me
I am a southern boy from North Carolina who went to the far north to Pittsburgh, seeking an education in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. As I went through my courses, I realized that the goal for all my engineering projects was efficiency - making chips or devices work faster, cheaper, and smaller. Here I realized that people who actually use the devices engineers create need an advocate. Users need somebody to work with the engineers to make sure whatever the engineer concocts will actually be usable and not require an engineering degree.
This led me to the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon, where I pursued a degree in Human Computer Interaction. In the HCI program, I took classes and worked on projects across several disciplines - designing, programming, writing, statistics, psychology, and human factors. I learned how to start from a problem and end with a simple and intuitive solution that fits the user through various techniques.
Not only did I graduate with a Bachelor's and Master's in HCI, but also with a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and B.S. in Psychology (with focus in cognitive and social psychology). This diverse background comes from my enjoyment in logical problems and thinking, doing detailed research, understanding how people think and respond with others and machines, working with people in different backgrounds, and coming up with solutions to difficult problems.
I currently work at Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh, PA as a Human Factors Engineer. Westinghouse provides fuel, services, technology, plant design, and equipment for the commercial nuclear electric power industry. My role is to collaborate
in creating and improving design features; review design features and
applications against human factors principles and guidelines; develop and
perform user tests of high risk design features; track and resolve human
factors design issues; research potential new technologies to incorporate
into human system interface designs; lead a team in performing human factors task analyses; and lead a team and participate in human factors verification and validation activities. Working at Westinghouse I have enhanced my skills in designing products, employing iterative design, performing user tests, human factors principles and their application, working with others of various backgrounds to solve problems, and managed a team to perform task analyses and verification activities.
Previous to working at Westinghouse, I worked at BarkleyREI as a User Experience Architect. BarkleyREI provides websites and content management systems for non-profit organizations, higher education, tourism, and commercial industries such as healthcare. As a User Experience Architect, I performed focus groups; created website structures and interfaces; collaborated with designers, programmers, and clients; performed user tests and modified the website interface based on results; and assisted fellow user architects. In addition to working on website, I developed designs to enhance BarkleyREI's content management system. At this job, I enhanced my skills in personas, user research, competitive analysis, user testing, website and interaction design, employing iterative design, and working with others of various backgrounds to develop intuitive websites and solve problems.
