Before Coinbase & the Council on Foreign Relations, I worked for many prominent news organizations and freelanced a bit. Here’s my story.

My journey started as a student of architecture, pursuing a Masters at RPI. After a year and a half in the program, I realized my passion for design lay in a different area. So I moved to New York City and completed my Masters in Communications Design at Pratt Institute.

After graduating, I started out as a web producer at Atlantic Records where I soon became a web designer and a videographer designing artist album sites and filming acoustic performances and interviews. Then it was life at Condé Nast as a designer working in their marketing group. But it wasn’t until I joined The New York Times in 2006 that I came to understand what product design was and began to truly practice it.

The Times was paving the way both technologically and transforming the way stories were told online at the start of the web 2.0 era and I had the privilege of joining them at this juncture. There I learned how to work with journalists and what true cross-functional collaboration should look like across product and engineering. I didn’t realize at the time how ahead in the industry the Times was and that the lessons I learned there I would carry through the course of my career. 

From the Times, I joined Newsweek.com and helped build and lead a small team of designers. After Newsweek, I went to ABC News, during which time the iPad debuted. I was able to work with my team on the first of its kind HTML5 iPad app. And from ABC News, I moved over to The Wall Street Journal. I started off as an independent contributor and moved to managing the full Product Design team through a redesign of WSJ.com and its app.

While news had been rewarding, after eight years in the industry, I decided to move on from WSJ and freelance as I wanted to design for different industries. Taking advantage of the Silicon Alley scene in New York, I worked for start-ups in healthcare, entertainment and tech and consulted for the Asset Management team at J.P. Morgan.

After a couple of years of freelancing, the opportunity to build and lead a team at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) presented itself. Although I enjoyed freelancing, the 2016 election season was gearing up and I realized that I missed designing for news. While not a breaking new org, the non-profit’s approach to analysis and long-form storytelling appealed to me. And also being a think tank, there was an opportunity to make their studies more accessible to the general news reader. When I first joined, we partnered with Code & Theory to redesign the site, enabling it to be competitive in the space with larger news orgs such as NYT & WSJ. In my first year, I also contributed to a project on the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest that won a News & Documentary Emmy for Outstanding New Approaches in Current News.

During my five years at CFR, I was able to build up and lead a cross-functional team that included a multi-disciplinary design org, product management, photo editorial, data analytics and content strategy. My team partnered with both our Editorial colleagues and the Fellows launching several projects such as the Cyber Operations Tracker, an infoguide on modern slavery, a task force report on U.S. innovation and national security, a study on the legal barriers that woman face globally for workplace equality, a new podcast distilling the foreign policy issues of the day called Why It Matters, and the unknowingly timely reveal of Think Global Health, just two months before Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

Now I am a Product Design Manager for the Coinbase Cloud product line where I am learning about crypto and DeFi while also applying all that I’ve learned over the years at a company that is at the forefront of web 3.0. I’m excited to see what the future holds here.