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UX Certificate Faculty

Our faculty represent some of the sharpest minds in the UX field.

Bill Albert
Bill Albert, PhD

Bill Albert, PhD, is Executive Director of the User Experience Center at Bentley University. Albert brings more than 15 years of experience in user experience research and design to his role leading the center. He has expertise in user interface design, information architecture, qualitative and quantitative research techniques, and user experience strategy. Prior to joining Bentley, Albert was Director of User Experience at Fidelity Investments, Senior User Interface Researcher at Lycos, and Post-doctoral Research Scientist at Nissan Cambridge Basic Research. Albert is currently an adjunct professor in the graduate program in Human Factors in Information Design at Bentley University.

Albert has published and presented his research at more than 30 national and international conferences. He co-wrote (with Tom Tullis) the first book on usability metrics, Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics (first edition 2008, second edition 2013). He also co-wrote (with Tom Tullis and Donna Tedesco), Beyond the Usability Lab: Conducting Large-Scale Online User Experience Studies in 2010. Albert is Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Usability Studies.

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Dan Berlin

After providing technical support for hard-to-use systems for a number of years, Dan Berlin discovered the world of user experience (UX) when he sat as a participant in a usability study. That’s when he quit his job and went full-time to Bentley University to earn an MBA and an MS in Human Factors in Information Design. During his 13+ year UX career, Dan has lived the agency life and spent 10 of those years building the research team and practice at Mad*Pow, an experience design agency in New England. He recently started Watch City Research, a UX research consultancy in Waltham, where he focuses on usability research in different product domains. He served on the UXPA Boston Board of Directors for eight years and served as the submission chairperson for their annual conference from 2012 to 2021. Dan is the editor of “97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know,” a book of UX essays from 97 different authors. He’s also on the Board of Directors for the Waltham Land Trust and can often be found kayaking along the Charles River or hiking with his dog, Shadow.

Vandhana Bhaskaran
Vandhana Bhaskaran

Vandhana Bhaskaran is a passionate human-centered design leader with more than 15 years of experience in driving design-led business change. A firm believer in the power of design thinking to facilitate business transformation, she helps businesses identify and build on opportunities to continually improve customer experiences and employee engagement. She currently leads the User Experience and Design thinking competency for Emirates Airline, based in Dubai. Her specialties include service design, customer experience management, usability analysis and user experience design. She is also the co-host and mentor for Global Service Jams, a global network of service design aficionados across 50 cities, who all share a common passion for growing the field of service design and customer experience.

Shmuel Bollen
Shmuel Bollen

Shmuel Bollen has been working in the human factors field since 1997 when his research and design skills informed his work at Bose Corporation as their first Intranet Webmaster. He is currently a Senior Product Manager, caring for athenahealth's design system. His long-standing interest in the power of emotional engagement as a competitive advantage led him to develop a method for using psychophysiometric research in product design. Shmuel has also proposed a redesign of the safety information on the back of the American school bus, and has presented at several national conferences on this topic. He is a graduate of (and a mentor in) Bentley University's HFID program.

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Meg Cater (they/she)

Meg Cater is currently Director of Experience Design at Signiant, building software solutions for media companies of all sizes around the world. They lead two cross-functional teams made up of UX designers, researchers, UI developers, and UX language experts. After graduating from The Evergreen State College in healthcare and environmental sciences in 2000, Meg pursued science and health journalism before finding their home in UX. Meg now has over 15 years of experience in the field and earned an MS in Human Factors in Information Design from Bentley University. Meg loves how the UX field attracts people with such diverse backgrounds and is dedicated to building mutually supportive teams that positively impact both workplace culture and product users.

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Rahul Divekar, PhD

Rahul Divekar, PhD, is an assistant professor at the information design and corporate communication department at Bentley University. Prior to Bentley University, he has worked on various aspects of dialogue systems at Educational Testing Service (ETS). He received his PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from the computer science department where he worked on building immersive conversational AI for language learning. His work was covered by prominent media outlets such as the Associated Press, MIT Tech Review, New York Times, etc. Through his experience, he has developed an expertise in the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Human-AI Interaction especially in the field of conversational AI and is happy to share it with you through the UXC.


 

Bill Gribbons
William Gribbons, PhD

William Gribbons, PhD, is the academic director of the Information Design certificate program. He is also the director of the Human Factors in Information Design program at Bentley University. Gribbons was the driving force behind the Design and Usability Center, where he serves as senior consultant. He is a past President of the Boston Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication (STC), an associate fellow in the STC, and a member of the Technical Communication editorial board. Gribbons received his PhD in education and visual communication from the University of Maryland.

Bill Hartman
Bill Hartman

Bill Hartman, leads Essential’s efforts in product and service discovery and definition, mapping strategy opportunities and driving development agendas. He is an expert in the translation of user and channel inputs into design requirements to best support business goals. Prior to Essential Design, now part of UK-based PA Consulting, Bill worked as an independent consultant to clients in a number of industries. His past roles also include VP of Product Development at Fitch Worldwide, and Director in the User Experience group at Scient/Razorfish. He is a graduate of Davidson College (A.B.) and the Institute of Design/Illinois Institute of Technology (M.Des.).

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Sarah Johnson

Sarah Johnson is an Assoc. Sr. Manager of Content Strategy at CVS and teaches content strategy at the Bentley University User Experience Center. She has twenty-five years experience at companies such as CVS, TIAA, Fidelity Investments, and Bank of America. She works with content teams to grow both leadership and UX skills. She has run content strategy summits within her UX teams and spear-headed a workshop, The Art of the Difficult Conversation, which she developed in conjunction with Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. The workshop went on to be offered corporate-wide at TIAA. She’s a graduate of the InnerMBA offered by SoundsTrue, LinkedIn, and NYU.

Demetrios
Demetrios Karis

Demetrios Karis has been researching, designing, and evaluating consumer products and services for over 25 years at Verizon Wireless, Verizon Telecom, GTE, Grumman Aircraft Systems, and the University of Illinois. He helped design GTE Airfone and several speech-based systems, and then for ten years led the SuperPages.com user interface group at GTE Labs, where he established a program for developing a comprehensive understanding of the user experience. Demetrios also worked on the Verizon broadband customer experience, from DSL installation to the use of value-added services such as online backup and sharing and gaming. Demetrios established and led the User Experience team at the Verizon Wireless LTE Innovation Center, and also worked on smartphone user experience, mobile phone applications and accessibility. He has published dozens of articles in diverse areas, including autobiographical memory, cognitive psychophysiology, automation using speech recognition, human factors, and usability evaluation methodologies. Demetrios received a B.A. in Psychology from Swarthmore College, a PhD in experimental psychology from Cornell University, and an NIMH postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois. He is now an independent consultant and for the last several years has been doing volunteer UX research for the MA Trial Court. Every fall in his Field Methods course he now supervises student projects with the Trial Court.

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Shipra Kayan

Shipra Kayan has spent the last 15 years in UX leadership roles, most recently building a UX research function at Upwork. She is passionate about building inclusive, engaged and effective design teams, especially when they are not physically co-located. She is currently working with distributed product and design teams to facilitate remote design studios and sprints. Shipra has a Masters in HCI from Carnegie Mellon University. 

James McElroy
James McElroy

James discovered the profession of UX after a series of chance encounters with a disgruntled architect, an Olympic ski coach, and an automotive designer led to an introduction to the first human factors engineer hired by Bose Corporation over 26 years ago.

James instantly fell in love with a profession he had never heard of. Despite having just graduated an expensive engineering school, he took a job paying high school wages so he could pursue his dream job.

He started out by prototyping and co-designing the world's first handheld touchscreen stereo interface (essentially Sonos on an iPhone a decade before the iPhone existed), and returned to school to become one of the first students in the Bentley University HFID program. 

Over the past 26 years, James has built and led UX teams for companies across diverse industries ranging in size from startups to Fortune 5, gravitating to design leadership and systems thinking roles.

James began teaching as a favor for a fellow HFID alum who wasn't able to teach his own class. That was over a decade ago; James had so much fun teaching he never stopped. His classes blend understanding the underlying principles of design with navigating the real world challenges and politics you can't learn from a book. 

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Jen McGinn

Jen McGinn is a Senior Director of Product Design at VMware, where she leads a global team of UX professionals. She's been leading teams, designing, and conducting user research activities since 2003 at Sun Microsystems, Nokia, Oracle, CA Technologies, and Veracode. Jen presents regularly at regional and international UX conferences, and has co-led the group mentoring activities at the Boston UXPA conference since 2012. She has published and presented on a variety of topics, such as persona development, presenting research results, conducting heuristic evaluation, focus groups, severity rating scales, interactive journey maps, UX strategy, and how to incorporate user research into Agile development environments. Jen holds a BS in Information Systems from UMBC and a MS in Human Factors from Bentley University.

allie
Allie Miller

Allie Miller is a User Experience Researcher at Google. She currently leads mixed methods research for Firebase’s Developer Experience team, while also volunteering on civic and non-profit social impact research. With over 8 years working in UX, she loves combining her interests of research, writing, and design to craft excellent user experiences. She received a BS in Communications from Cornell University and a MS in Human Factors in Information Design from Bentley University.

Peter
Peter McNally

Peter McNally is a Senior Consultant at the User Experience Center. Pete has more than 20 years of experience in usability, information architecture, accessibility, and software engineering. His current areas of interest include the intersection of user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX), universal design, voice UX, and the internet of things (IoT).

Pete holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Northeastern University and a Master of Science in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He holds a CPACC (Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies) certification from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP). He is a member of the International User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA), Boston UXPA, Boston CHI, and IAAP.

Darrell
Darrell Penta

Darrell is a mixed methods UX Researcher at Google, where he leads research on behalf of the company's employee-equipment operations and services teams. Darrell is also an adjunct professor in the HFID program at Bentley.

Darrell holds a PhD in Psychology from Northeastern University, where he designed and conducted experiments to investigate human language processing. He has been a speaker and invited guest at several universities and UX conferences. He is passionate about teaching research-related topics, particularly to students who don't have a background in methodologies and statistics.

Kirsten Robinson
Kirsten Robinson

Kirsten Robinson is Director of Product Design at BitSight Technologies. She has worked in the user experience field since 1999, when she became an information architect at Dynamic Diagrams, a design and visualization consultancy. She has held UX individual contributor and leadership positions at The MathWorks, Endeca, Oracle, and Brightcove. She considers herself a generalist, with interests in user research, design, and evaluation of complex user interfaces. She loves to use visualization techniques to brainstorm, explore information, and communicate. She is a frequent presenter at Boston-area UX events and has contributed to several books. Kirsten holds an MS in Human Factors in Information Design from Bentley and a BA in Cognitive Science from Brown.

Fiona Tranquada
Fiona Tranquada

Fiona Tranquada is a UX Manager at The MathWorks where she leads a team of researchers and designers who support a wide variety of web and mobile applications.  She has more than 15 years of experience in user research and user-centered design and has presented on these topics at conferences around the world. She drew on her extensive research experience to co-write (with Donna Tedesco) “The Moderator’s Survival Guide: Handling Common, Tricky, and Sticky Situations in User Research” in 2013. Fiona holds a BA in Professional Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and an MS in Human Factors in Information Design from Bentley.

Minmin Yang
Minmin Yang

Minmin Yang is currently working as Head of UX, Migration Services, at AWS. She leads a team of UX design and research, working on 10+ products and initiatives. She has 15+ years of hands-on experience in both design and research including creating vision designs, prototyping at all fidelity levels, and delivering design specs for scrum teams, creating data visualization, conducting customer research by interviews and focus groups, creating personas and journey maps, and run usability tests and surveys. Before AWS, she also worked at Verizon, Autodesk, and Constant Contact. Minmin received her Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction at Rice University.