"I loved Dartmouth's cognitive science program because it allowed me to look at a complex topic (our brains, and specifically the visual system) from multiple angles via courses in neuroscience, biology, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. This multi-disciplinary grounding really resonated with me, and even today helps me remember that there are many rigorous ways to investigate (and solve) problems.
I graduated from Dartmouth in 2001 with a double major in Cognitive Science and Computer Science after completing a dissertation that used fMRI to study how we process visual information. I decided to continue this research in graduate school at University of Oregon where I earned my PhD in cognitive psychology in 2007. I spent the next few years after that as a postdoc at Stanford using similar (and new) MRI techniques to better understand visual processing children with neurodevelopmental disorders.
While I loved my academic work and felt that it was useful on a longer timescale, it didn't seem to be having an immediate, positive impact on the world. So I switched gears to become a user researcher. Now I conduct research to help companies build products that are as useful and useable as possible. I worked with a range of companies as a research consultant with AnswerLab for several years, and then joined Google as a user researcher in 2014."