Research
My research examines how people generate solutions, how those solutions fit into larger systems of use, and how institutions can learn from them without losing the context that made them work.
Behavioral innovation
Innovation research has traditionally focused on products and technologies. I study novel, useful practices created by users themselves: techniques, routines, workarounds, and ways of combining existing resources into something that works.
Women’s innovation across the life course
Women’s needs, bodies, responsibilities, and sources of knowledge shift across adulthood. My current research asks how innovations in health, parenting, work, care, and family systems emerge in different life chapters, and how some practices travel between them.
Systems of use
A product rarely solves a meaningful problem alone. People assemble systems of use from products, behaviors, spaces, knowledge, relationships, and services. I study how these elements work together, and when a product is central, supplementary, or unnecessary.
Human-centered healthcare
I apply mixed methods and human-centered design to understand barriers, surface tacit knowledge, and develop practical opportunities in healthcare, especially in safety-net and trauma-informed settings.
Current inquiry
Consider ages 30 to 35: a period that may include pregnancy, parenting, partnership changes, career growth, fertility care, or caring for parents. The practices a woman creates during this chapter may differ sharply from those she develops at 50 to 55, when menopause, chronic disease risk, caregiving, and retirement planning may reshape the system.
This developing program of research treats the life course not as a smooth line, but as a series of changing problem spaces. It asks which behavioral innovations arise in each chapter, what triggers them, and how products and services can support rather than replace women’s own problem-solving.
Discuss a collaborationA connected method
Surface lived experience, tacit knowledge, and the details that conventional measures miss.
Connect qualitative insight to broader patterns using surveys, computational methods, and epidemiology.
Understand how behaviors, products, services, relationships, and environments interact.
Translate evidence into theory, tools, interventions, product strategy, or a stronger question.