Behavioral design
Nudges, choice architecture, and decision supports built for healthcare settings where trust, clarity, and timing matter.
Content design • behavioral science • digital health
The missing piece between healthcare products and behavior change.
Content design shapes the experience; behavioral science explains why people act on it. I work at that junction — pairing content design craft with an MPH in Health Behavior to turn digital health products, patient-facing and clinician-facing alike, into interventions that change what people actually do, not just what they see.
My work spans patient and clinician experience, experimentation, and content strategy — translating complex health decisions into clear, actionable moments that improve outcomes.
Capabilities
Where strategy meets behavioral evidence.
I bring together experimentation, digital product thinking, health communication, and research rigor to build interventions that are credible, measurable, and useful in real healthcare contexts.
Experimentation
Randomized and quasi-experimental evaluations, A/B testing, and multivariate optimization for engagement and behavior change.
Content systems
Evidence-based content ecosystems for clinicians, patients, and public audiences, aligned to measurable learning and engagement goals.
Cross-functional leadership
Partnership across editorial, product, research, clinical, and executive teams to move strategy from idea to implementation.
Experience
Selected roles and impact.
A career shaped by digital health, patient communication, clinician engagement, and applied behavioral science across startup, nonprofit, and academic environments.
Behavioral engagement for clinician audiences
- Designed behavioral-insights-informed A/B and multivariate tests to optimize clinician engagement.
- Improved Women in Medicine engagement by 17% through targeted community-building and user-centered design.
- Built executive-facing recommendations from survey data, engagement trends, and advisory board insight.
Resilience content with measurable reach
- Designed a digital content ecosystem that produced 40+ original resources.
- Helped drive 500K+ views and 70% year-over-year growth through audience-centered strategy.
- Ran user research and coordinated multidisciplinary expert contributors to maintain rigor and relevance.
Digital interventions for patient behavior change
- Supported web and mobile behavioral health interventions using randomized and quasi-experimental evaluation.
- Translated clinical concepts into accessible actions across multiple specialties and patient populations.
- Contributed to content strategy for a breast cancer companion app later profiled in the Wall Street Journal.
Foundations in personalized health communication
- Built tailored coaching content, educational campaigns, and behavioral messaging logic for wellness and self-management.
- Worked across behavioral science, product, software, provider, and benefits teams to ship practical interventions.
- Grounded content and program design in evidence, scientific validation, and guideline-concordant care.
How I work
Diagnose behavior. Reshape decision. Measure results.
A repeatable process I bring to behavioral problems, whether the audience is patients, clinicians, or product teams. See it applied below in two full case studies.
Diagnose the behavior
Map the end-to-end path someone takes to reach a decision. Find where intent breaks down: confusion, distrust, bad defaults, or a missing nudge at the moment it matters.
Co-design with the audience
Bring in advisory boards, subject-matter experts, and real users before locking content. Their language and lived experience shape what gets built, not just what gets reviewed.
Reshape the message or path
Turn the diagnosis into a concrete intervention: new content, a changed flow, a different default, or a format the audience will actually use.
Measure and iterate
Build evaluation in from the start. Use what worked (and what didn't) to refine the next round of content, flows, and stakeholder recommendations.
Case studies
Two problems, worked end to end.
Deeper looks at how I diagnosed a behavior gap, worked with the people affected by it, and what changed as a result.
Building a content engine that lifted Women in Medicine engagement 17%
Role: Senior Editor and behavioral strategist · Doximity, Women in Medicine · 2020–2025
Challenge
Clinician attention is scarce and skeptical. Generic editorial content wasn't earning engagement from the Women in Medicine community, and top-down topic selection kept missing what these physicians actually wanted to talk about.
What I noticed
The content that performed best wasn't written for the audience — it needed to be written by them, and it needed formats built for physicians to actually contribute, not just read. That meant rethinking sourcing, format, and distribution together, not any single fix.
What I did
- Formed a hand-selected pilot Women in Medicine Advisory Board of practicing physicians, then opened it to applications the following year — drawing 80+ applicants for 5 positions.
- Ran working sessions with the board to brainstorm topics and review and refine candidate essay prompts before launch, so questions were both authentic and answerable.
- Packaged the vetted prompts into an essay contest that invited physicians to contribute their own stories, then built a distribution plan for the entries: the winner and runner-up were featured in a digest send, and other strong entries were published as evergreen content over the following 6 months.
- Separately, built a partnership with Women in Medicine Summit leadership, identified and secured a speaker, and co-executive produced a video on infertility among women physicians — one of the best-performing content pieces that year.
Before → after
Before
Editorial team selects topics internally; content is about the audience, engagement is flat.
After
Advisory board sources and vets prompts; an essay contest turns physicians into contributors, not just readers.
What this shows: The lift came from a combination of approaches — a physician-vetted contribution pipeline, a distribution plan that gave contest entries a longer shelf life, and original programming built through outside partnerships — not any single mechanism working alone.
Outcome
17%Lift in Women in Medicine engagement
Metric reflects the combined engagement effect of the essay contest, its distribution plan, and original video programming — not attributable to any one piece alone.
Designing a sexual health app that accounts for both cognition and emotion
Role: Health behavior specialist · digital sexual health program at an academic research center · 2014–2017
Challenge
Young men who have sex with men are a high-risk, historically underserved population for sexual health education. Most existing content was either clinical and cold, or moralizing and unusable — neither approach changed behavior.
What I noticed
The credibility gap was as much about tone as accuracy. If the app didn't speak the audience's own language about dating, hookups, and relationships, the safety and health content inside it would go unread.
Approach
- Partnered with a youth advisory board to define session themes, key messages, and example scenarios before content was written.
- Designed a session structure — sexuality & relationships, desires & behaviors, sexual well-being, body & health — that let users self-select into the topic that mattered to them that day.
- Wrote safety and consent content in a direct, judgment-free voice, paired with plain visual callouts rather than clinical warnings.
- Built weekly self-reflection prompts and behavior tracking so the app supported ongoing decisions, not a single visit.
Before → after
Before
Sexual health content for this audience defaults to clinical warnings or avoidance — both get ignored.
After
Consent, boundaries, and abuse content delivered in the audience's own voice, with a clear point of view: “If it's not a yes, it's no.”
What this shows: I can turn co-designed research into a full content system — tone, structure, and safety messaging — for a population that most digital health content fails to reach.
Outcomes
The program was independently evaluated in a randomized trial and a follow-up engagement study, both peer-reviewed. In plain terms: men who used the app were significantly less likely to report condomless receptive anal sex than a control group (26.7% vs. 45.7%), and were less likely to forgo condoms for the sake of emotional connection with a partner — the specific decision point the app's cognition-and-emotion framing was built to address (Rendina et al., AIDS and Behavior, 2019).
A second study looked at how depth of engagement, not just login frequency, tracked with behavior change. Users who viewed more content within the app showed larger drops in internalized homophobia and in how much they relied on dating apps for hookups. At 90-day follow-up, reported past-month sex partners dropped from 2.39 to 1.15 and experienced online discrimination fell sharply — while how often someone logged in, on its own, did not predict these changes. The sessions people actually read mattered more than how often they opened the app (Moody et al., JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, 2022).
About
Education, focus, and working style.
My background combines public health training with years of applied work in healthcare communication, digital intervention design, and program strategy.
Education
MPH, Health Behavior & Health EducationUniversity of Michigan
BA, Interdisciplinary Natural Sciences — BiologyUniversity of South Florida
Professional profile
Based inDenver, USA
Best known forBehavioral insights, digital health, experimentation
Additional experienceProject management and behavioral research support
Ideal collaborationsHealth tech, behavioral science consulting, patient engagement
Contact
Open to conversations about behavioral science, digital health, and strategic content work.
Happy to walk through additional case studies, writing samples, or a full resume on a call.