Movies are my favourite way to talk about my work and education, mostly because “let me tell you about this regression model” is a guaranteed nap trigger.
Why movies? In psychoanalysis, free association is a classic move: you use whatever pops into your head to get at feelings that are hard to say out loud. Cinema is my version of that. It gives me scenes, characters and plots that “get” what a job or degree felt like long before I can dress it up for LinkedIn.
So instead of just listing roles and courses, I cast them. A project becomes a heist film, a semester turns into a coming‑of‑age story, a job looks suspiciously like a slow‑burn political drama. It is my way of making the story honest, a bit ridiculous and much more memorable than a tidy bullet point.
In my third semester of undergrad, I made peace with a mildly brutal truth: I was an okay designer, not a great one.
But somewhere between botched layouts and messy prototypes, I realised what really lit me up was not “making things pretty” but figuring out what people like and why they like it.
Instead of wanting to be the star designer, I wanted to be the person behind the scenes, helping companies create products and services people actually cared about.
So I followed that curiosity into a Master’s in Design, specialising in consumer behaviour and trend analysis, and spent years happily poking at the “why” behind people’s choices.
Fast forward a decade, and that same love for digging deep, plus a lifelong addiction to nice stationery, pulled me back into the classroom again—this time to study behavioural sciences.
Professionally, I grew up in the field with a notebook in my hand, starting as a design researcher who loved sitting in people’s homes and asking “show me, don’t tell me.” Over time, those projects stretched into full‑blown ethnography, where I was less “doing interviews” and more quietly watching how culture, constraints and little workarounds shape behaviour. That curiosity about real‑world habits pulled me into behaviour‑change work and, eventually, into running end‑to‑end mixed‑methods studies that connect what people say, do and actually change over time. I began as a solo contributor with my recorder and sticky notes, and now I lead (and learn from) a small gang of young wizards who challenge my assumptions and make the work sharper.
