The Board of ResearchOps (affectionately known as the Cheese Board) is a group of leaders who have taken on the role of shaping and leading the community. Together, they share the task of caring for the community and harnessing all that enthusiasm within it for our emergent profession.
Each year, according to our Terms of Reference, we check in with current board members to see if they would like to recommit themselves to the work of the community. Where board members opt to step down, they form an alumni and act as mentors for new board members coming in. New board members are found via an expression of interest, and come from across the globe. We have a focus on ensuring our community is represented as much as possible within the board, with as rich a diversity of experience as possible.
Holly Cole
Holly Cole (She/They) has always been focused on understanding the context before changing anything that works. Holly has always been passionate about helping people, originally running the ResearchOps Community in her spare time if that tells you anything. She loves to both hear and tell a good story but hates public speaking – unless it's teaching college art classes. Holly is a Texpat living in New Jersey with roots in North Carolina, but hopes you don’t hold any of these things against her. Holly also thinks bios should be more about who people are than their resumes which you can find elsewhere. She’s getting more comfortable with being who They are, which is less about “She” and more about actions. You can find Holly on Twitter at @hollyface1975
Benson Low
For over 20 years, Benson had led design teams across Australia in emergent web, games development, start-ups, design consultancies, and enterprise product design teams. Early in his career, his designs had award recognition, and more helped mature and led Design practices. Benson has been a board member of the ResearchOps community, organising workshops, and meetups, and has been part of global projects since 2018.
In recent years, Benson helped establish UX Research practice at Australia Post and built user research as a core capability across key products and initiatives. At REA Group in PropTech, he led design capabilities across product design, user research, design systems and content design teams. Recently he has been consulting research at Atlassian.
Alexa H.
Alexa (She/Her) is a researcher and strategist specializing in building effective products that realize opportunities within consumer behavior. Having worked in early stage startups, international award-winning agencies, and Fortune 500, Founders and Product teams seek Alexa out when defining product-market fit, articulating product strategy, and conducting market, behavioral, qualitative, and quantitative research. In her free time you can find her building software with her friends or playing board games.
Brenda Ray
Brenda Ray (she/her) is a qualitative and mixed-methods researcher originally trained as a UX generalist. She is passionate about research and ensuring designs are accessible, inclusive, ethical, and usable. Since starting her UX career, she has worked with a variety of organizations ranging from start-ups to government agencies.
In 2019, she built the UX research practice at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee before leaving to conduct research for FEMA. She now works for RSM’s Human Centered Design from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Brenda runs Techqueria’s UX Cafecito in her free time, helping bring together the UX Latinx community.
Brigitta Norton
Brigitta Norton is a Digital Strategist and User Experience and Accessibility specialist based in Canberra, Australia. She prides herself on her ability to turn disengaged end users into enthusiastic contributors by creating user-friendly, inclusive and accessible digital experiences. Amongst her professional experience with government agencies and local businesses, Bri has previously been the Australian Government Digital Transformation Agency’s Accessibility and Inclusivity Lead, is the co-chair and the conference convenor for Australia’s Web Accessibility Initiative OZeWAI.org, is a Standards Australia committee member for Accessible ICT Procurement and proud to be a member of the ReOps Cheese Board. You can find her for a chat on Twitter @algazel or LinkedIn @brinorton.
Casey Gollan
Casey Gollan (he/him) works in Research Ops at IBM, with a focus on Insights, Data, and Technology. He brings over a decade of experience building organizations, transforming operations, and growing communities at the intersection of research, design, and technology. Previously, Casey ran operations for an academic research institute; worked as product designer, front-end developer, and user researcher; co-founded an art school for technologists; and worked as a practicing artist and art professor. When he’s not in front of a screen, you can find him camping in the middle of the woods with his partner. You can find him on Twitter @CaseyG or LinkedIn.
Dana Chrisfield
Dana Chrisfield is a researcher whose approach to research and ops has been shaped by work in academia and financial services, and by an unflagging commitment to the idea that the tech we build and the experiences we create can do actual good for the people we serve. She leads a talented team of researchers and researchops-ers at American Express and has been honored to play a role in helping the ResearchOps community to unpack the wonderfully complex landscape of research repositories. You can find her in the ResearchOps slack, on LinkedIn, or wandering through a forest pondering the life experience of trees.
Frederik Bader
Frederik Bader is a UX Research Manager living near the beautiful city of Heidelberg in Germany. He has a B.S. in Online Media, a M.Sc. in Media Informatics and worked as a qual UX Researcher and UX Ops Manager, always as an ambassador for the user. Frederik is also a lecturer at the DHBW Mosbach.
Graham Gardner
Graham Gardner is a creative-minded researcher working to build and scale the Design Research Operations discipline at global design and innovation company, IDEO. A tinkerer in the world of research, he feels most at home problem-solving, process-diagramming, story-telling, and helping others. He is passionate about diversity, equity, and inclusion and believes that revolutionary design starts by revolutionizing our systems and processes for understanding, creating, and designing the future together. You can find him walking around parks in Rochester, New York with his neuroscientist wife and two fluffy dogs or online at grahamg4rdner.com.
Jahnavi Mirashi
Jahnavi Mirashi is a partner at Hureo, a user research consultancy based out of Pune, India. Before beginning her journey with Hureo, Jahnavi worked in various domains such as advertising and digital media, giving her a unique perspective on designing for the end user. At Hureo, while she wears many hats, she mainly manages the research practice including research ops. She’s passionate about advocating for user research, ethical research, and highlighting the diversity of users and user research in India. You can find her for a chat on Twitter at @jahnavimirashi.
Jake Burghardt
Jake Burghardt is a consultant and writer based in Seattle. Jake is focused on using repositories and operations to activate research insights in product planning and design – enhancing collaboration, amplifying learning, increasing literacy, and driving customer-centered launches. Previously, Jake owned ‘insight hub’ repositories in Amazon’s Retail and Alexa divisions. Prior to working within research communities, he consulted on products in a range of domains, including: power plant operation, new space engineering, cockpit avionics, genetics instrumentation, creative production, and financial trading. You can find Jake on ResearchOps Slack, and he welcomes connections on Linkedin and Medium.
Jhanshi Mishra
Jhanshi Mishra, based out of India, is working as Research Program Manager at Salesforce. She owns and manages multiple Research and Insights projects/ programs and is extremely passionate about Research Operations, Relationship-building, UX Process optimisations, Problem-solving, and Diversity Inclusion and Equality programs. With a solid educational background of MBA & B.Tech, Through her journey with multinational companies, talented co-workers and professional certifications, she has gained great expertise in the fields of Program/Project Management, Process Improvement, Stakeholder Management, Communication Management, Vendor Management, Data & Account Strategy, PreSales Consultancy and Business Intelligence.
When she is not working, you can find her traveling, clicking beautiful photos, watching movies, socializing and upscaling herself, both personally and professionally. She is a total foodie and loves Chai (Indian Tea), Biriyani (Indian delicacy), Sushi and Pani Puri (Indian street food).
She is proud to be a new member of the ReOps Cheese Board and can't wait to create an impact! You can look her up for a chat on LinkedIn.
Jonathan Richardson
Jonathan Richardson is a freelance User Researcher who specialises in working in the public sector. He’s led Agile user-centred projects for the Government Digital Service (GDS), Ministry of Defence, NHS, and University of Southampton, amongst others. Before that he worked at the BBC’s Future Media & Technology division.
Jonathan’s background is in anthropology and interpreting human behaviour and is a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
He believes that writing about and sharing user experience methods and techniques will help improve the community of practice and is always happy to discuss this on LinkedIn and is now based in Queensland, Australia.
Leanne Waldal
An early tech adopter and enthusiast since her dad built her first computer, Leanne is also an amateur cook, casual cocktail maker, and lover of opera. Directly out of university, she started a career as a statistician—before statisticians were rebranded as data scientists. She then started her own agency that focused on research, analytics, QA, and testing for web and mobile. For the past several years, she has led B2B, B2C, B2B2C research and analytics on design and product and marketing teams at Dropbox, Autodesk, New Relic, Bold, projekt202, and HOVER, while mentoring and consulting about research practices. She'll connect and chat with anyone on LinkedIn and has been documenting her broken ankle recovery, and other experiences, on Medium.
Megan Scheminske
Megan (She/Her) is a Portland, OR based mixed-methods researcher and team leader currently building the research practice at Teachable. She loves working with kind, creative humans on mission-driven products that align with her values, and gets particularly excited about empowering kids and other underrepresented groups who typically don't have a big voice in the product development process.
Noreen Whysel
Noreen is a Brooklyn based researcher, information architect and teacher. She has over 25 years' experience in digital management consulting, specializing in understanding and designing accessible information spaces, digital archives, and data and usability standards. Her recent research includes publications on the effect of climate change on healthcare access by vulnerable populations, accessible science gateways and online data privacy and safety.
She is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Communication Design Department at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is COO of Decision Fish LLP, providing decision research and behavioral economics consulting. At Internet Safety Labs she developed a product integrity framework for the ISL Safe Technology Specification. She also serves as Secretary/Editor of the Kantara Institute Resilient Identifiers for Underserved Populations Working Group (RIUP WG), and is a member of the ReOps Community business board.
Olivia Chakraborty
Olivia (she/her) is a practitioner studying Information Design in Bangalore, India. She is passionate about human-centred design and user experience research. Mental health, animals, and nature are the three things that are very close to her. Human psychology appeals to her which is why she chose the user experience field. She wants to work for the betterment of her society and environment while catering to the mental health needs of society. She would like to contribute as much as possible through design and research.
Between 2019-2022 she has organised and curated 5 exhibitions in her city, Kolkata under her organisation Youth Art Scene. It was a thrilling experience of managing such a diverse community. Sketching, listening to music, journaling, and reading are the other things that are close to her, and she never wants to stop doing that.
You can find her on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Pollie Barden
Pollie Barden is a researcher focused on continuing to develop practices that are ethical and unbiased. In particular, her research centers around working with digitally disenfranchised communities through participatory methods. She has over twenty years of experience in UX design and research management. Pollie has a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from Queen Mary University of London. She has presented her research, game, and artwork at conferences, museums, and exhibitions across the globe.
Sheralee Francisco
Sheralee Francisco, based out of San Jose, CA and has worked in the tech industry in various roles from Marketing, Biz Ops, Product and Program Management. This experience has helped her transition to Research Ops where she has built the research ops practice from the ground up at various organizations, leveraging the ReOps Pillars as her foundation. She enjoys collaborating with global teams, building new business models, streamlining, and improving processes in support of the research ops practice.
Alumni
Kate Towsey
Founder of the ResearchOps Community, you can find Kate’s ways of working throughout the community - her care about being global and her commitment to this being a space for research operations. In 2018, Kate left the community to focus on building and managing a global team delivering research operations for Atlassian.
Brigette Metzler
Brigette (she/her) was originally the co-chair of the community alongside Holly Cole. A jump-in-with-both-boots kind of a person, she is unafraid of big dreams and is passionate about the democratisation of knowledge. Brigette is currently the ResearchOps Lead for the Australian Government’s Department of Agriculture, Water and Environment. Brigette is passionate about the role of ResearchOps in helping researchers do their best work and most weeks can find her talking ResearchOps, and libraries in particular, with people from all over the place. You can find Brigette for a chat on Twitter at @BrigetteMetzler
Andrew Maier
Andrew Maier (he/him) is a public-interest designer working with organizations to improve their services, mature their design practices, and kickstart learning communities. He is the co-founder of two publications, UX Booth and Civic Quarterly, and he recently completed a four-year term at 18F, and 2014 Fellowship with Code for America. Andrew was the U.S. coordinator for the 2018 #WhatIsResearchOps workshops and has been with ReOps from the beginning. You can find him for a chat on Twitter at @andrewmaier.
Brad Orego
Brad Orego (they/he) is a User Researcher, Experience Designer, Entrepreneur, and Dancer currently located in Brooklyn, NY. He spends his days as the Director of User Experience at 1010data as well as dancing professionally with Sokolow Theater Dance Ensemble and Kanopy Dance Company. He is a graduate of the University of Rochester with a B.S. in Computer Science, a B.A. in Psychology, and minors in Spanish and Dance. You can learn more about him and his thoughts via his website.
Chris Adams
Chris Adams is an environmentally focussed tech generalist, spending the last ten years working in tech startups, blue chip companies and government, as a user researcher, product manager, developer, sysadmin and UX-er. He runs Product Science, a small product development consultancy, and lives in Berlin. Chris is an original board member of Team ReOps and has worked extensively on the administration of our large Community. Chris runs the Community Town Halls.
Dave Hora
Dave Hora is a researcher fascinated by how teams work together—and what it is that makes research work. As a five-time "first researcher," he established the research program at one consultancy and four startups in Silicon Valley, and now consults as the Employee of the Month at Dave’s Research Company, Ltd.
Elizete Ignácio
Elizete Ignácio is a Researcher and Anthropologist based in Brazil, currently working in consulting Tech Company and Social Organizations in UX Research and Social Impact Research fields. In the last 7 years, she ran her research agency, and before that she built a career as an academic researcher and teacher, researching technology, traditional Brazilian culture en Brazilian music. Eliz is writing the first book about UX Research in Portuguese with the other two co-authors. She is a board member of the ResearchOps Community and ran the Skills Research Framework workshop in Brazil.
Emma Boulton
Emma Boulton is a Design / User Research Leader based near Cardiff in the UK. Now working as a freelance consultant, she previously led research at Monotype and in the BBC’s Audience Research team. She was a co-founder of the boutique design studio, Mark Boulton Design and there ran User Research projects for global clients such as Al Jazeera, CERN and Global Witness. As the commissioning editor of popular indie publisher, Five Simple Steps, she was instrumental in amplifying many new voices in the industry. Emma also writes and speaks and you can often find her sharing her thoughts on Twitter @emmaboulton.
Hugo Froes
Hugo Froes is a Product Ops specialist with a background in building better products for people through user centered design methodologies. In recent years, his focus has been around empowering teams and individuals to grow and do their best work. This includes looking at product development processes, working relationships, on-boarding, training, frameworks and so much more. He loves to give back to the community by teaching and mentoring, while also being involved in global communities. Co-founder of UXDiscuss and Design Research Portugal.
Judith Mühlenhoff
Judith Mühlenhoff is a user and innovation researcher from Berlin with a background in sociology and a Ph.D. in innovation management. She is specialized in the front-end of innovation with explorative research for product discovery and strategy." @judithmp
Mark McElhaw
is a lateral thinker with a couple of decades of experience in digital strategy, design and research. His sweet spot vacillates somewhere between making sense of the world and letting go completely. This probably explains his current focus on a research & design framework based on mindstates and a Buddhist eightfold umbrella.
Nishita Gill
Nishita Gill joined ResearchOps right at the beginning, and was the country coordinator for India for the WhatIsResearchOps workshops. Nishita’s company Treemouse designed the ReOps brand and the website. Nishita trained as a designer from NIFT, Delhi (Accessories) & NID (New Media). She has been working as a researcher and designer for 8 years across startups, SME's, design studios and MNC's before founding Treemouse in 2016.
Rebecca Wood Spagnoli
Rebecca is a Sr. UX Researcher living in Austin, TX, USA. Her passion is helping teams find their “aha” moment when it comes to the value of UXR and growing research practices. This passion (and her frustration with recruiting and the “insights black hole”) brought her to ResearchOps.
Shem Rajoon
Shem Rajoon (he/him/his) moved to Harlem, NY from Trinidad & Tobago at age 11 and immediately got involved with HarlemLive, a world-renowned youth journalism organization in 1996. In the span of over a decade, he was nurtured into a leader and an advocate for the voices within his community. Equipped with a press badge, Shem had the agency to ask questions and a platform to be seen and heard. Today, Shem is a Community Builder and a Product Design coach-leader for teams at software technology companies, strategically championing design, user experience research, communications, branding and design systems. Most importantly Shem is (as a mentor of his often says) "an artist who cares".
Tomomi Sasaki
Tomomi is a designer, bringing product strategy, design research and facilitation skills to challenges like organizational culture change and improving the customer experience. She lived in Tokyo for almost two decades before moving to Paris in late 2014. Exploring: learning as a social activity, the nature of unfolding conversations, and building organizational capabilities for design and research. Co-founder Design Research Tokyo. Say hi on Twitter @tomomiq.
Zack Naylor
Zack has been helping people make better and more informed design and product decisions for over 10 years ranging from startups to Fortune 100 companies in nearly every industry there is. He was an early contributor to several startups such as ModCloth.com, Lockerz and Pikimal as well as Principal UX Designer at The Nerdery, successfully helping teams with wide ranging needs create sound goals, conduct customer research and connect intelligent insights to product decisions. He's currently the co-founder and CEO of www.aureliuslab.com. Zack was a core member of the team responsible for the global #WhatIsResearchOps project. Zack was a board member from 2018 to 2019.