Welcome the newest HCDE Alumni leadership board (ALB)!
Introducing the newest HCDE alumni to join the leadership board
Earlier this year, we put out a call for HCDE alumni that wanted to be part of the next cohort that will represent the HCDE alumni leadership board. We’re excited to share our newest members, and we can’t wait for them to help make the ALB even better! Here’s a little bit about each person in their own words.
Jacob McCalmont
Jacob is an inclusive, collaborative learning and development leader transforming culture through engaging, high-impact learning programs that excite employees, reduce training time, and address business problems. At Mosaic, he builds and leads project teams which meet learner needs and address workforce challenges by leveraging instructional design, adult learning theory, major educational technologies, and competency-based learning approaches to design high quality learning programs. Outside of work, Jacob is a passionate Seattle Sounders supporter, plays part-time mechanic to an old truck, and an avid reader.
Julius Magsino
Julius has been a part of the UX industry for the past 10+ years, working at various companies and groups in the Seattle area such as T-Mobile, the University of Washington, and Microsoft. With recent events making healthcare more relevant than ever, he has shifted focus as a Senior UX Designer at 98point6 where he helps discover new and innovative ways to make primary care affordable and accessible to all. As an advocate for helping the UX community grow, Julius often mentors new or aspiring designers/researchers through hackathons and UX-related organizations. In his spare time, Julius enjoys exercising, going out for drives, learning new skills, and playing video games.
Sabrina Kang
I currently have the privilege and honor of leading a group of 40+ UX Researchers at the Financial Services firm, Charles Schwab. My background is diverse. I worked as a broadcast journalist and in marketing before transitioning to UX Research in 2014. I’m good at collecting data and making sense of it to help stakeholders with product direction. The messier and complex the UX Research question, the better. I also love building processes to support teams.
Stefania (Stefanie) Gueorguieva
Stefania is a contract UX Designer at Microsoft as part of the Identity team focused on designing experiences in Azure Active Directory. Her work involves facilitating how people access resources at work and ensuring their information is protected. She is passionate about solving complex enterprise problems and delivering seamless experiences. Before moving into the field of user experience and completing her master’s in HCDE, Stefania worked as a visual designer for a few years and studied Fine Art, German and International Business. Outside of work, she enjoys making art, going on long bike rides, spending time at the climbing gym and connecting with new people!
Mike Arcari
Dynamic, collaborative business leader with 12+ years of product marketing experience and a passion for improving the quality of other people’s lives — by shaping products that deliver on user needs and communicating the unique value propositions of those products through the power of effective marketing.
I have a diverse background with extensive working experience in development, design, copywriting, CRM administration, campaign management, and marketing operations. I also possess a formal education in human-centered design and engineering (HCDE), marketing, leadership, communications, and product management. My passion for learning has fueled both my professional and personal growth over the years. I’m happy to share insights, advice, feedback, and guidance to help you reach your goals.
D’Marcus Butler
I was born and raised in Atlanta, Ga, and have been living in Seattle for about 4 years. One of the ways I like to give back to my community is through supporting education. Looking at my life, becoming educated getting my bachelors and masters degrees has changed my life more than I could have ever imagined and I want to help others achieve the same. I also focus these efforts on underrepresented groups because too often we don’t believe that this is a viable path.
Shiqi (Ivy) Zhang
Shiqi (Ivy) loves to switch hats between UX design and product strategy. While she’s a UX designer at work, she also plays many roles in her life — 👩🍳chef @ home, 🎿skier in winter, 🩰ballet dancer on weekends, 🐈mom of 2 rescued cats, and 📚reader at heart.
Rachael Cicero
Rachael is the current Civic Designer for the City of Seattle’s Innovation and Performance team. Prior to her transition into design, Rachael spent over six years managing design and engineering work at companies such as Twitter, and Seattle-based design consultancy, Artefact. Her decision to transition into design was prompted by her desire to not simply facilitate the development of human-centered technologies but to be on the frontlines, researching and codesigning them. Her focus now as Civic Designer is to create impact in local government by partnering with city departments, using human-centered design, to create experiences that afford equitable interactions for all Seattle residents. When she’s not thinking of the next design challenge to tackle, Rachael is most likely out hiking with her dog, Sully.
Jihoon Suh
Jihoon is currently working in video-presence platform in Facebook Messenger. He has background in Industrial Design and HCI, and is interested in tech-adoption and immersive computing. Outside of his daily job, he drives side-projects with his friends on new interesting ideas and actively mentors design portfolios.
Anne de Ridder
A 1999 M.S. graduate of the UW HCDE (previously Technical Communication) program, Anne has dedicated her career to bridging the technical and non-technical in order to deliver value for end users and businesses. She has worked on digital products with companies across a broad range of industries in roles spanning product management, user experience and information design. She also holds a B.A. in Chemistry from Occidental College, a certification in Pragmatic Marketing (PMC-III) and is a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO).
Ginger Corley
I graduated from the University of Washington in 1980 after meeting all the requirements for a degree in English Composition as well as one in Scientific and Technical Communications program as it was called then. However, at that time the program’s degrees only showed as “General Studies.” So, Jim Southern and Mike White advised me to simply keep the title of my degree as English Composition, assuring me that they would vouch for me to anyone who inquired that I was a highly capable Tech Writer and graduate of their program. It was a joke that my English Comp professors said I wrote fiction with an engineer’s voice and that professors in the Tech Writing program said I wrote technical works like a novelist. I was pleased with both descriptions as it meant I truly had reached my goal of writing in the middle ground.
I worked as a writer for various companies for roughly ten years before getting the bug that was running rampant in the local tech industry. Everyone was doing start-ups so along with three others, we started a company that developed a product. I still spent most of my time writing and interacting with the public but now my tasks expanded to include business plans and investor relations, along with general Marketing. I had been studying for my MBA at night school for years and I can assure you that starting up a company and having it go belly-up two years later was far more educational than any graduate degree program. To clear up the company’s debts, I moved into a sales job in the telecommunications niche and have been there since.
I do write sales proposals but mostly these days I write for fun about my hobby. I’ve been breeding and showing a rare American breed of sled dogs for about thirty years so I now am a freelance writer for the dog hobby press. It’s a lot more fun than writing manuals or trade magazine articles on things such as “The Parallel History of Voltmeters and Calibration Instrumentation from World War II to Present.” I’ve even added some “canine Pulitzers” (from the Dog Writers Association of America) to the awards I won from the Society for Technical Communications annual competitions.
I knew I was going to be a writer when I was eight years old and through college, I took every writing class the University of Washington offered, regardless of the department sponsoring it. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being a writer; it’s just who I am, an intrinsic part of me. The UW HCDE program as it’s now known helped make me who I am today and for that I am incredibly grateful.
Susan Stainsby
Susan helps people use technology to solve problems, be more efficient, and chase their dreams. This may look like an artfully crafted UI string, engaging web content, or an intuitive site experience. She also leads projects, drives content initiatives, and builds teams. She’s currently managing a team of content professionals at GoDaddy, and she previously spent 15 years at Microsoft in the Office and Engineering Excellence groups. In her free time, Susan enjoys seeing new places, reading, hiking, and riding her bike that goes nowhere.
