As a non-traditional, first-generation college student and person of color, life has not led me down the most direct path towards finding my true calling in human-centered design. I can still vividly remember the quiet summer night in 2016 when the life-long ache in my soul for justice was ignited into action. That night my family sat around the campfire, playing games and cuddling the kiddos. As a police car slowly passed our campsite, my 5-year-old nephew, Travis, said to my 4-year-old son, “Grayson run, it’s the cops!” to which he replied, “Why, the cops are nice, they have stickers!” My heart sank, these two kids are best friends, related by blood, live 15 minutes apart, spend every holiday and birthday together. Outwardly, only the color of their skin differs, and situationally, the economic status of their fathers. I struggled to fight back tears as I fumbled to tell him he couldn’t run from the cops. I looked at my nephew, in an oversized dark hoodie, and thought of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice, the weight of the pervasive impacts of systemic racism and oppression sank into my heart, how the world sees my nephew effects how he sees himself and impacts his mental wellness. What kind of mental health education, tools and support do the millions of children impacted by the pervasive ‘isms’ in our society and their support networks need to navigate healthily through this world, and how will they get access to this support?

 Nearly every moment of every day since that impactful night has been shaped and fueled by the question, how can I research and design technology tools to improve the mental health of underrepresented populations? Working with Drs. Sean Munson, Julie Kientz, Patricia Areán and Doyanne Darnell at the UW ALACRITY CENTER I’ve gotten exposure to a myriad of projects, populations, treatment techniques, principal investigators and methodologies. In every case, qualitative exploration I conducted to discover individual voices within a population of interest uncovered invaluable data that shaped the projects and results. Projects ranged from unstructured interviews to discover engagement strategies for international youth, to structured qualitative survey and content analysis for understanding the needs of isolated older adults during the COVID-19 Pandemic, to detecting suicidality using Google search language, search patterns and music-listening behaviors, to using bots to help train nurses on suicide prevention, and iterative cognitive interviews to create a digital measure to capture “Fulfilled Living”. These projects have led to many insights, with the lessons not only in research design, quantitative and qualitative analysis, but also operating within low-resource and global to local contexts.