About
Product, with a reason to build it
I'm Mel. Product manager/designer from Korea, based in Pittsburgh.
I grew up in a family that lives with autism. It taught me early to notice the pain points people learn to live with, especially in communities that products tend to overlook, and to care about work that creates real social impact.
To me, impact means fixing the root of a problem rather than its surface, in a way that can sustain itself and reach people at scale. That kind of work is rarely done alone, which is why I love bringing talented people together on cross-functional teams toward a shared goal.
I work across UX design, AI and data, and product management, and I'm always open to new experiences, new things to learn, and new people to meet.
What I've been up to
Research Assistant, School of Design
Researching spatial interaction at the intersection of design and HCI.
- Advisor: Prof. Daniel Rosenberg Muñoz, School of Design
Master of Design, Design for Interaction (HCI)
Fellow, Block Student Fellowship on AI and Society.
M.S., Information Management (Data Science minor)
Academic Excellence Scholarship.
Visiting Scholar, School of Computer Science
Researched LLM-based vocabulary learning: co-first-authored publication at EMNLP 2025 Main.
- https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1299.pdf
- Selected for the government-sponsored CMU AI Intensive Program ($41K), KAIST & IITP
- Advisors: Prof. Rita Singh, Prof. Bhiksha Raj, Language Technologies Institute
AI Product Manager
Led Kurly's AI transformation, scoping and shipping AI systems across search, recommendation, merchandising, and product data for a 3.5M MAU grocery platform.
Product Manager & Cross-Functional Team Manager (SaaS)
Apr 2023 – Mar 2024
I joined as the 10th employee and grew with the company from Seed to Series B. Led end-to-end development process of Sleep Track, a B2B AI SaaS platform (API, SDK, Dashboard) that made AI sleep analysis easy for enterprise clients to adopt.
Product Manager & Cross-Functional Team Manager (DTx)
Sep 2021 – Mar 2023
Led an insomnia CBT-I digital therapeutic (software as a medical device) in partnership with Seoul National University Bundang Hospital.
Product Manager
Apr 2021 – Sep 2021
Designed the UX of Asleep's first B2C app and the voice interface for the Sleepvice Amazon Alexa Skill.
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Industrial Design (UX/UI Focused)
Academic Excellence Scholarship.
Product UX Designer, Freelance
Facilitated ideation workshops with designers, executives, engineers, and end-users at LG Electronics R&D Center to develop future concepts for home appliances.
Recognition along the way
1st Place, Global Data Convergence Talent Program Showcase
Ministry of Science and ICT
Excellence Award, LLM Clinical Note Datathon
Seoul National University Bundang Hospital
Featured Case Study, Google Cloud Summit Seoul 2024
Google Cloud · AI Search at Kurly