“Wait, your degree is in… English?”
It’s a question I’ve heard throughout my career, usually after a conversation about programming, digital fabrication, artificial intelligence, grant writing, or wildlife habitat. Technical Communication gave me a home for those seemingly disparate interests because it asks not only how technologies are built or function, but how they are articulated, adopted/refused, and woven into the communities that use them.
Nearly every chapter of my career has explored threads of a few central questions:
- What conditions allow people to participate, adapt, and flourish within communities?
- How do technologies and infrastructures influence who is able to participate, create, and belong?
- How can we help people with different forms of expertise, experiences, and perspectives communicate with one another?
This page traces how these questions have taken me from computer science to technical communication, from Midwestern makerspaces to the Middle East and back, and from AI research to wildlife habitat restoration in northern Michigan.
I began my undergraduate studies at Michigan Technological University as a computer science major, interested in programming and web development. I quickly discovered that I was equally interested in how technologies are designed, explained, and experienced by people: the ways individuals and communities shape technologies, interpret their possibilities, and use them in practice. I changed my major to Scientific and Technical Communication (STC), which allowed me to continue exploring programming/coding and emerging technologies while developing skills in writing, visual communication, rhetorical analysis, audience-centered and participatory design.
That humanistic perspective informed by technical understanding became central to my work. While an undergraduate, I attended the Science & Liberal Education: C.P. Snow and the Two Cultures @ 50 conference at Michigan State University. The conversations there reflected a tension I had already encountered: STEM fields and humanities programs often approached problems differently, but many of the challenges facing communities and organizations require collaboration across those boundaries. Technical communication offered me a way to help bridge those gaps.
After completing my bachelor’s degree, I continued that exploration at Purdue University, where I earned graduate degrees in English with an emphasis in rhetoric, composition, and professional communication. What attracted me to rhetoric and composition was its ability to connect research and teaching across disciplines—from technical communication and workplace writing to game studies, digital media, and emerging technologies.
While at Purdue, I taught technical writing, business writing, and first-year composition courses, building on my undergraduate experience as a teaching assistant for an introductory web design course. Teaching became a co-creation process with students as I learned how people learn unfamiliar technologies, how communities form around shared practices, and how to create spaces that facilitate learning and participation. These themes carried into my research as well.
In 2013, I attended my first Maker Faire in Cincinnati. Seeing hobbyists, engineers, artists, educators, and entrepreneurs come together around emerging digital fabrication technologies and exploring traditional crafts in unexpected ways expanded my understanding of what collaborative communities could be. It also prompted questions about who was represented in these spaces and who had opportunities to participate. I began incorporating 3D printing and digital fabrication into my writing courses, exploring how students used new technologies to communicate arguments and transfer knowledge across disciplines, while investigating the social and cultural conditions that shape participation in technical communities. Those experiences became the foundation for my master’s thesis and eventual dissertation research on DIY communities, identity, technologies, and participation. Sharing projects at maker faires and designing DIY instructional guides—contributing to the communities I researched and taught about—became as important to my professional development as presenting at conferences and publishing.
My research and teaching was complemented by opportunities to work directly with the digital infrastructures that support organizations and communities. During graduate school, I served as Assistant Director of Technology for Purdue’s Professional Writing Program and worked as a web content writer for the College of Liberal Arts. These roles expanded my experience with website management and hosting, content management systems (CMS), content strategy, and the everyday collaborative work required to help organizations communicate effectively online.
Travel and community engagement have consistently shaped my understanding of communication as well. During a 2014 study abroad experience in Scotland, I explored post-industrial sites, large-scale infrastructure projects, maker and hackerspaces across the country, and attended the Paris Maker Faire. These experiences deepened my interest in how communities use technology, repurpose former industrial spaces, and how governments and public institutions can support sharing technical knowledge while creating belonging.
A later visit to Dubai, UAE and my 2019 move to Doha, Qatar as an assistant professor of professional writing further expanded my international perspective. What I initially expected to be a two-year experience became a four-and-a-half-year chapter of my career, shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic. Living abroad required me to repeatedly enter unfamiliar environments and learn how to participate within them, whether navigating new institutional structures and adapting to cultural expectations, or building relationships across linguistic and cultural differences. Teaching at Qatar University introduced me to students with a wide range of linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds and reinforced the importance of understanding local contexts when designing communication and educational experiences.
My time abroad also deepened and complicated my understanding of participation, inclusion, and community-building. My graduate research examined how institutional policies, cultural expectations, and physical and digital infrastructures shape opportunities for participation. Much of my work in the United States was grounded in explicitly intersectional feminist and queer approaches to questions of technology, identity, and access. Living and working in Qatar reinforced that these structural critiques are inseparable from the lived realities of people navigating those structures. While policies, infrastructure, and visible advocacy shape possibilities for participation, communities are also sustained through quieter, localized forms of work: relationships built over time, trust developed through care and discretion, and everyday acts of listening and adaptation that help people feel they belong.
My research on artificial intelligence developed from similar questions and matured abroad. Beginning in 2018, I became interested in how generative design tools—such as Autodesk’s Project Dreamcatcher—might change participatory design practices. If AI could simulate aspects of human feedback and expertise, how would that affect collaboration, creativity, and decision-making? Whose experiences would be represented? This work received recognition through the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing Graduate Research Award and eventually developed into Artificial Infrastructures, my co-authored book with Michael Salvo, which examines how generative AI is reshaping writing and communication practices.
In 2024, I returned to Michigan after my time abroad (between blizzards, no less!). During that transition, I spent time reconnecting with the landscapes that shaped my early life—kayaking inland lakes, hiking and snowshoeing trails, and building new relationships in northern Michigan’s many outdoor communities—while completing work on Artificial Infrastructures. I also began a new chapter of community-based environmental work: winning a grant through the Kalkaska Conservation District to support wildlife habitat improvements on the land where I grew up.
This grant-funded project connected many of the threads that have shaped my career: research, technical communication, attention to the design of spaces, grant writing, and community engagement. It also expanded my understanding of habitat. Much of my career has focused on shaping social and technological environments—classrooms, online spaces, DIY communities, and organizations where people can participate meaningfully. Through conservation work, I began applying that same attention to habitats that support birds, deer, pollinators, and other wildlife, while also learning more about conservation organizations throughout Michigan.
In 2025, I returned to Michigan Technological University as a visiting assistant teaching professor, where I had the opportunity to reconnect with the university and the broader Keweenaw community. Through teaching grant writing and professional communication, I collaborated with community partners and learned more about regional conservation efforts, including the work of organizations focused on land preservation, native ecosystems, and community spaces.
Across these experiences—from technology and digital fabrication to higher education, nonprofit partnerships, and environmental stewardship—the common thread has been technical communication as a form of connection. Whether designing a website, writing a grant proposal, teaching students, researching emerging technologies, or working with community organizations, my goal has remained the same: helping people share knowledge, connect and collaborate effectively, and build stronger communities.