The Whole Story

I am an inquisitive person who wants to understand the world around me, and a mixed-method (synergy of qualitative and quantitative methods) technology and organizational researcher who fosters innovative cross-disciplinary collaborative research projects across university, public, private and non-profit spaces via equitable leadership that generates insights and inspires team members.

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My career trajectory began by getting a Bachelor of Business Administration in marketing management, then working in media buying and consumer perceptions. Examining how individuals processed media, images, and interfaces to construct a product focused reality drew me towards the theories that underpinned what they were consuming. I followed that line of inquiry to the next step in my education, doing a master’s degree in film and visual theory while also teaching small group test prep courses. Developing a deep understanding of the systems that define the visual word in which we live and the satisfaction I got from teaching kids forged a desire in me to become a high school teacher.

 

Over the course of my career as a teacher in Little Havana, Miami, FL I began to experiment with technologies ranging from those in my classroom to the devices students used outside of school. My classroom became a mad scientist’s laboratory of experimentation at the intersection of technologies designed, or more often repurposed, for teaching, learning, and HR workforce optimization. The Tech Cave, as my classroom was called, sparked my curiosity about how what drove the creation of these technologies, raising questions about why business software like PowerPoint was more commonly used in classrooms than were the digital composition tools like Instagram my students used on their own; or why my gradebook looked like our HR interface, but worse. I needed to figure out where the disconnect between design, implementation, and end user experience was situated.

 

To find the answers to these questions, which few people seemed to have, I decided to get a PhD in education with a focus on language and digital literacy learning in multilingual settings. I was fortunate during my studies to experience many aspects of secondary and post-secondary research across many content spaces. However, I found that my love of helping kids and adults by finding answers to technology-based problems through experimentation and deep analysis of multiple data sources was often of secondary importance to university administration’s focus on publishing articles that the very people I wanted to help did not have access to read.

 

Ultimately, I realized I would have to head into the private or non-profit sector if I wanted to expand the impact and benefits of the solutions I find through my research. So here I am, writing to you from the very beginning of the next phase of my journey to improve the lives of others through research into the design and implementation of complex technological innovations.