As a researcher, technical communicator, designer, teacher, and grant writer, I strive to leverage the best resources for clients, colleagues, and students in order to help them build tight-knit organizations, robust web spaces, and exciting new user experiences. I firmly believe that all citizens deserve access to the most effective modes of communication for carrying out their professional and personal goals.

Starting fall of 2013, I’ll be Assistant Professor of Technical and Professional Communication at East Carolina University after two years as an Assistant Professor in the Professional Writing program at SUNY Cortland. I have my Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing from Michigan State University. Hailing from scenic Fallon, NV–seriously: if you click on that link you will understand so much about me–I received my BA in English (Writing Option) from University of Nevada-Reno, and both an MFA in Poetry and an MA in Composition Theory from California State University-Fresno.

My research focuses on the development of communication infrastructure for organizations engaged in social justice projects, and the implementation of democratic communication frameworks within professional organizations. My current research project is tentatively entitled “Engaged Design: Going Beyond Participation When Users Know More than You,” and stems from research into the implementation of participatory design methods within a professional organization devoted to communication design.

I have consulted and formed research and service-learning partnerships with many non-profits and businesses, including iFixit.com, a technical writing firm which hosts a wiki-based DIY repair website in order to reduce e-waste and encourage the sustainability of technological devices. I am Communications Manager for the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (ACM SIGDOC) and am an active member of the Triangle User Experience Professionals Association and the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing and also serve on the latter’s Teaching Committee.

In my free time, I enjoy meditating, the martial arts, hiking, reading, gaming, ruminating on the cancellation of Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles and Firefly, and trying to inject democracy into the spaces and places I find myself in.