I'm a design engineer who thinks like a researcher and ships like an engineer — turning messy product problems into interfaces people trust.

I work end to end — user research and interaction design through to production React and TypeScript. I came to design from STEM: years of engineering and coding through a microelectronics degree, then product design at grad school for Human Factors.

I design interfaces and build them for real — and I'm still a teammate, not a lone wolf. I ship my own work, then hand off clean, code-synced components the rest of the team can run with.

I started in hardware. My B.Eng was in microelectronics at SUSTech — five years of circuits, physics, and code, learning to reason about systems from the transistor up. I could build things that worked, but I wanted to build things people could actually use.

That's what brought me to Human Factors at George Mason — a deliberate move to deepen my understanding of HCI on top of the engineering I already had. The bet was that a technical background plus real psychology training would give me more product leverage than either one alone. It did: I learned to run studies, model cognition, and design for how people actually perceive and decide — then turn around and build what the research called for.

Chevis at Usabilathon 2022, a HelloFresh-sponsored UX audit design marathon — Won an award at Usabilathon 2022 — HelloFresh's mobile UX audit design marathon. November 2022, during my Human Factors program at George Mason.

Chevis during graduate study at George Mason University — George Mason — my M.A. in Human Factors, grad school years.

Since then I've closed the loop by shipping. At Solara and Treevah I designed products and helped engineer them; at AethrDesign I build AI web apps and code-synced component systems in production React. The throughline hasn't changed: understand the system, respect the human, and actually ship.

That work also raised the bar on what I needed technically. Design engineering means owning the full stack a product runs on — backend systems architecture, data modeling, API logic layers — not just the interface on top. So I'm finishing an M.S. in Information Studies at Trine, focused on the computer science side: the systems constraints and data-driven strategy that sit behind every frontend I build. The program is structured for working professionals, so I'm fully available for full-time roles now.

2025 — Present
Design Engineer · AethrDesign
My own solo practice — I design AI web apps and code-synced component systems for startups and small teams, then build them in production React. Nineteen engagements so far, at one to four weeks each, down from about twelve back when every build was hand-made.
2024 — 2025
Product Designer · Treevah
AI-powered file-management SaaS. I redesigned the product's core navigation and its AI features, and led the four-person design-system team behind the 80+ components engineering actually adopted.
2023 — 2024
Product Designer, UX Lead · Solara
Open-source Python web framework, in a team of five. I owned the documentation portal and the marketing site end to end — research through hi-fi prototypes — plus the visual identity and the 100-plus-component Figma library underneath both.
2021 — 2023
Design internships
Three back-to-back internships taken through my Human Factors master's at George Mason — how I got into the field.
- Vierra Digital — Lead UI/UX Designer. A desktop CRM application for small medical practices; promoted out of the intern role at four months to run the design system and manage four designers.
- Campus Collect — Product Design Intern. Led the design group for a student marketplace mobile app with 50,000+ college users.
- Entagile — Product Design Intern. A staffing firm's marketing site — I designed it, then taught myself Framer and built it, CMS and all.
2018 — 2021
Freelance Front-End Engineer
Websites and brand identities for small tech businesses and early-stage startups, built in Framer, Webflow and WordPress — but the parts those builders couldn't reach I wrote by hand in JavaScript and CSS, and the interaction and motion work in Rive and Jitter. Self-taught, alongside the engineering degree below.
2016 — 2021
B.Eng Microelectronics · SUSTech
Five years of circuits, physics and code — MATLAB, Java, Python, AutoCAD. My capstone, in Qingsha Cheng's lab, was a MATLAB PsychToolBox experiment on how people correct their aim across repeated attempts, fitted with Space Mapping, an algorithm borrowed from electronic design optimisation — an odd thing to hand an engineering department, and where this pivot actually started.