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Thursday, July 29, 2021, 4-5pm ET

During this week’s call (Thursday, July 29th, 4-5pm ET (convert to your time zone here), Advancing Research 2021 conference curators invite a special panel of researchers to discuss the future of research. In particular, panelists will share their perspectives about the research practice and how they expect the discipline to evolve. To provide additional grounding for our conversation, we will be discussing, broadly, results from the survey we recently launched, which is designed to learn more about the topics and themes that you, the community, believe will be important to advancing the research and insight industry over the next year. Our esteemed panel of cross-disciplinary researchers, includes: Steve Portigal (Principal Researcher & Rosenfeld Media Author), Dr. Gloria Osardu (Senior Researcher at Amazon), Alba Villamil (Principal Researcher and HmntyCntrd Facilitator) and Sam Ladner (Principal Researcher at Workday). Dr. Jamika Burge (Entrepreneur and Head of Experience Products & Platforms Research at Capital One), one of our AR curators, will be moderating the discussion. Join us!

About our panelists

Dr. Jamika D. Burge leads AI Design Insights at Capital One. Her team uncovers learning & research insights across multiple platform experiences, including conversational AI, which supports Eno, Capital One’s customer-facing intelligent assistant. She’s an authority on intersectionality of Black women in computing and co-founder of blackcomputeHER.org (pronounced ‘black computer’), an organization dedicated to supporting computation & design workforce development for black women and girls.

Prior to joining Capital One, she served as a research and tech consultant to DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in the Information Innovation Office. While there, she provided technical and management consult for innovative DARPA programs which were funded at over $70M. Jamika is also Founder and Principal of Design & Technology Concepts, LLC, a tech consultancy that focuses on computer science education, tech research, and intersectional design. She has consulted for Google, the National Center for Women in Technology (NCWIT), and the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U). Jamika holds a PhD in CS from VA Tech.

Steve Portigal is an experienced user researcher who helps organizations to build more mature user research practices. Based outside of San Francisco, he is principal of Portigal Consulting, and the author of two books: The classic Interviewing Users: How To Uncover Compelling Insights and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories.

He’s also the host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast, where he interviews people who lead user research in their organizations. Steve is an accomplished presenter who speaks about culture, innovation, and design at companies and conferences across the globe.

Gloria O-B Osardu Ph.D. is a UX Research Senior Leader who is passionate about three things: 1. Equitable customer/user experiences in tech, 2. Narratives and storytelling that triangulates user insights from multiple sources of data collection. 3. Hiring, growing and coaching the next generation of UX researchers, designers, and computer scientists. Her love for technology and innovation informs her focus on making technology usable for all. She currently heads research teams and efforts across multiple AWS Services to optimize the customer/consumer experience with cloud solutions. Prior to her current role, she led design research for Enterprise AI/ML Platforms and Consumer Digital Identity Services across Capital One. Gloria is passionate about mentoring and giving back to the community. She also believes in order to ‘build for all’, there needs to be equity, diversity, inclusion and belongingness across research and design teams. Over the last several years, she has volunteered to teach girls how to code, mentored UX researchers, and served in various capacities with local and regional robotics competitions. With her work and passion, Gloria has received several awards recognizing her passion and excellence in using research-driven insights to inspire innovation, shape product strategy, and increase efficiency. She hopes to inspire women in tech with her experience and encourage black women to ‘have it all’ through balance and patience. Outside her work at AWS, she spends time with her family and teaches middle and high-schoolers how to design, code and test their creations.

Alba Villamil is an independent User Researcher who specializes in designing for the social sector. Her work focuses on making products and services more equitable for historically underserved and vulnerable populations like refugees, low-income parents, and domestic violence survivors. She is also a facilitator at HmntyCntrd, one of Fast Company’s 2021 Most Innovative Companies, where she teaches about research and design ethics to design practitioners.

Sam Ladner is a sociologist who helps teams innovate, design, and learn. She is the author of Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in The Private Sector and Mixed Methods: A Short Guide to Applied Mixed Methods Research. She has worked on dozens of advanced software projects including Alexa, the Echo Look, Windows 10, Microsoft Office 2016, Cortana, and HoloLens. She currently works at Workday, an enterprise software company, as a Principal Researcher studying the future of work. She received her PhD in sociology from York University and lives in the Bay Area with her husband and cat.