HCI Researcher · Systems Engineer
Researcher in human-AI interaction, AI safety, and adaptive learning systems. Graduate work in kinesiology and computer science.
Competitive athletics from adolescence through graduate school (track and field, distance running, strength sport) grounded an early interest in motor learning, physiological adaptation, and biomechanics.
At San Diego State University I earned my bachelor’s in kinesiology with honors; at California Baptist University, my master’s, where my thesis proposal designed a randomized controlled trial on yoga intervention for overuse injury prevention in distance runners. The limitations of studying physiological dynamics through analog methods motivated a transition to computational approaches. My current research spans human-AI interaction, AI safety, and adaptive learning systems, including recent survey work on how perceived emotional safety with AI companions relates to human self-disclosure and help-seeking. Papers are submitted or in preparation for AIED, EDM, IJHCI, Philosophy & Technology, and OzCHI.
I am currently completing an M.S. in Computer Science (AI/ML) and founded Meridian Labs: twenty-six production apps, over sixty-eight thousand exam questions, algorithms grounded in cognitive science. The entire platform was designed, built, and maintained by a single researcher using AI-augmented methodology.
Trilingual in English, German, and Spanish. I have lived in Germany, Costa Rica, Peru, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the United States.
I grew up in Freihung, a village of 2,500 in Bavaria’s Upper Palatinate, raised by my German mother and grandparents, my grandmother Bavarian, my grandfather Latvian. My two siblings and I were the only mixed-race children in the village.
My education started in the German system. When my mother remarried a U.S. soldier, the family moved to Kaiserslautern. I attended a German school there with a more international student base before transferring to an American military high school at sixteen. My conversational English, picked up from my mother and American media, carried me socially but fell short academically. Two years of ESL closed that gap.
At twenty, I enlisted from Ramstein Air Base and left Europe for the first time. After aircrew training and SERE survival school, I was assigned to the 21st Airlift Squadron at Travis Air Force Base as a C-17 Loadmaster. Over four and a half years I flew 455 sorties and logged nearly two thousand flight hours in Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation New Dawn. I separated a year before my enlistment ended due to health concerns and received an Honorable Discharge in 2014.
The years after the military were difficult. A PTSD diagnosis led me to explore approaches beyond standard treatment: yoga, nervous system retraining, and in 2017, traditional healing practices in the Peruvian Amazon.
Those experiences pointed me toward first-person research methods and the study of subjective experience.