About

I spent seven years in philanthropy learning how institutions move resources to communities—and how often those resources fail to reach the people they’re meant for. At the Susan T. Buffett Foundation, I co-authored national health strategies, drafted workplans with government ministries across three continents, and designed the budget tracking system for a $300M portfolio. At the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, I managed a 14-partner environmental justice portfolio and led the charge on expanding legal eligibility for grassroots organizations to access philanthropic funding.

I kept seeing the same gap: the research was solid, the funding was there, but the interface between institution and community was broken. Briefs were stale. Visualizations were nonexistent. The people closest to the problems couldn’t engage with the materials designed to serve them. So I went to Stanford to learn how to fix that interface.

At Stanford’s MS Design program, I’ve been building at the intersection of systems thinking, graphic design, and community-engaged research. I wrote and designed an 80-page publication at the Taiwan Design Research Institute—Don Norman called it essential reading for design education. I’ve conducted 30 ethnographic interviews with Indigenous communities on AI’s impact on biomedical research through Stanford Medicine’s HELIOS Lab. And for my thesis, I hand-turned 17 wooden figurines, embedded NFC chips in their bases, built custom AI agents for each one, and sent them into San Francisco to reactivate queer history.

I didn’t leave philanthropy. I went to get the tools to transform it.