About

I lead UX research and product strategy at Lucid Motors, where I work on AI, voice, and multimodal experiences across navigation, climate, HMI, and the publicly announced Lucid Intelligence platform. My work sits at a particular intersection: research that defines what should be built, strategy that makes the case for building it, and prototypes that make the idea tangible enough to test before it's fully buildable. Most of my recent work has lived in the space between those three.

The thread running through my work is that I'm drawn to ambiguous, emerging-technology problems where the right product doesn't exist yet and someone needs to figure out what it should be. That's true whether the problem is what a voice assistant should feel like in a car, or what trust looks like in an autonomous vehicle, or what a research function should look like inside a fast-moving design org. The work I'm best at involves combining rigorous research with strategic framing and rapid prototyping, and I think the most interesting AI products of the next decade will be built by teams that can do those three things together rather than in sequence.

The first half of my UX career was at Toyota Research Institute, working on UX research for autonomous driving: passenger experiences in fully autonomous vehicles, driver trust in partially autonomous ones, and accessibility considerations for users with different abilities. That work contributed to over $1M in project cost reduction and a 200%+ usability improvement across the program. It also gave me a foundation in research for technology that doesn't yet exist, which turned out to be the right preparation for AI work that came later.

Since 2021 I've been at Lucid Motors, currently as Lead, UX Research & Strategy. I've worked on Gravity multimodal HMI (research that influenced the steering wheel controller, tactile feedback, and HUD/ARHUD direction, contributing to an iF Gold Award and a patent expected to grant soon), navigation strategy validated through a global 350-participant concept evaluation, digital climate controls with voice UX (co-inventor on a patent pending), the AI voice prototyping platform that lets designers test voice-first concepts without engineering support, and contributed to the platform strategy publicly announced as Lucid Intelligence.

I also helped expand internal research infrastructure: growing Dovetail adoption by ~100 users, more than doubling usage, launching newsletters reaching ~3,500 employees, and expanding the Employee Research Panel by 450+ people. Last year I was a recipient of Lucid's Extra Mile Award.

The career underneath this took an unusual path. I trained as a computer engineer in Mumbai, then spent two years as a screenwriter in the Hindi film and television industry, writing for TV shows and short films, including Durga, which premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in 2015. I learned more about how attention works, how decisions cascade through narrative structure, and how to revise something fifteen times without losing what made it true, in those two years than I have in most years since. The discipline of writing scenes that have to earn every line still shapes how I think about voice UX and conversational design. After that, I led content strategy and digital marketing at IOTAP in Mumbai, then moved to Seattle for a Master's in Information Management at the University of Washington, where I specialized in user experience research and design.

Outside of work I speak four languages (English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi), plan travel with a level of detail that my wife finds excessive (and is often grateful for), with multi-week itineraries down to the hour and minute, including backup plans for every situation, and tell long, cinematic stories about those trips afterward. Lately I've been building small apps on weekends through vibe-coding, mostly as a way to keep my instincts as a builder sharp. On some weekends, I play cricket, and I'm slowly learning how to pull a decent espresso at home.