Mark Shekoyan, PhD

I started my academic career earning a doctorate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oregon, based on ethnographic research of Kundalini Yoga practitioners in the US and a Taoist folk sect in Taiwan. I still maintain something of an academic presence; you can see that side of my work here.

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My love of technology, creativity, and practical research impact pulled me out of academia and into applied anthropology in Silicon Valley in the fall of 2000. Since then, I've worked within software, architecture, and product design firms, honing my craft as a design researcher, strategist, and facilitator, including more than 15 years leading UX research programs at organizations such as Wealth.com, UserTesting, Cisco, PayPal, and Upwork.

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My training as an ethnographer shapes how I approach every engagement. I use contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, and usability testing to get past what people say and into how they actually think and work, then bring teams the full arc of practices that turn that understanding into product decisions, from framing the right problem, to generating and testing concepts, to running the co-creation sessions that build shared conviction across a cross-functional team. I facilitate design sprints and workshops both in person and fully remote.

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The PhD isn't a credential I set aside once I left academia; it's the reason I don't stop at a research readout. Anthropology trained me to look for the underlying structure behind behavior, not just the surface pattern, which is what makes the difference between an insight that sits in a report and one that actually reshapes a roadmap.

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Outside of work, I practice Kundalini Yoga, Qigong, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and spend as much time as I can outdoors in the Pacific Northwest.