Vanessa owns NIFPlay's entire digital presence, from UX and product strategy to the technical systems underneath. She built the current nifplay.org from the ground up and continues to run its ongoing optimization and roadmap.

Her background is at the intersection of human-computer interaction and learning engineering, holding a Master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. This training shapes her unique approach to user experience: she designs software the way scientists design learning — mapping exactly what a person needs to understand, identifying where friction occurs, and engineering it away.

When she's not rebuilding something that didn't ask to be rebuilt, she's probably underwater or halfway up a mountain — ideally somewhere she's never been before.