Intro
I am a User Experience Researcher and Cognitive Psychologist who uses a mixed methods approach in order to understand user needs, attitudes, environments, and perceptions. I approach everything in life according to my 3 Cs: Cognition, Culture, and Creativity. I am an empathetic and passionate leader who always puts her team first. I am a Filipino-Canadian-American with a love of family, friends, funnies, funk, and food — and I always go back for seconds!
Top 5 Clifton Strengths
Learner. This strength explains why I truly feel like I have never worked a day in my life! I am a natural-born researcher. The discovery that we experience through the research process feels like breathing, embedded in my very bones. I find learning, and sharing what I’ve learned, to be absolutely thrilling. This means that I thrive best in dynamic, flexible, eclectic work environments that we craft together!
Intellection. I am exceptionally introspective, and you’ll often find me layers-deep in thought about my latest project, my latest hobby, or my latest debate. I particularly love to think about thinking, which is why it makes so much sense that I sought out my MA in cognitive-behavioral counseling and my PhD in cognitive neuroscience! Whether I am contemplating how to make sense of something, or just generally marveling at how make sense of anything, I truly never tire of looking at data from all angles. Rest assured that if we collaborate together, I will find ways to continuously pull out valuable insights from all of our data!
Input. I get so many thrills from curation. Once I have gathered lots of insights, my next passion play is to experiment with how to organize those insights. Some of my favorite projects include crafting our research taxonomy, playing with creative readout ideas, and organizing long-shelf-life research according to various themes and applications. Think of me as a research librarian of sorts, and I’ll always have your favorite topics top of mind!
Focus. Every research project must start out with a hypothesis, and I treat all of my work in a similar manner. I am goal-oriented, and I operate best when I get to help shape goals and define outcomes. I have found that I am most successful when I can set up mini goalposts for my journey, and then return to assess and revise them along the way. I am also able to stay extremely present and determine how to achieve a collective goal. Naturally, that process requires clear prioritization, which I can do without completely ignoring the things that we set on the backburner. You can count on me to help keep our teams on point!
Achiever. I am nothing if not driven. The goals that I achieve don’t matter as much as the enjoyment and fulfillment that I get from being able to see my projects and my teams through. It is this shared success that I love to celebrate, and it further fuels me to dream bigger; it inspires me to treat every project as an opportunity, every collaborator as a friend, and every step forward — no matter how seemingly small! — as a win. If my drive impresses or even intimidates you, then just remember that my wins are your wins too!
More info:
Read more about Gallup CliftonStrengths
Check out a free alternative called HIGH5
Read this strengths articles from the US Chamber of Commerce on how strengths are applied in industry
Learn how strengths assessment is rooted in positive psychology
Explore the Big 5, or OCEAN, another form of personality assessment useful for industry and backed by personality psychology
Leadership Style
After a collective 10 years spent managing neuroscience and psychology labs in academia, an industry-university research center, and UX Research teams for Verizon Connect, I have identified my leadership style as a mix of servant leadership and transformational leadership.
The positions I have held to date have often called upon my servant leadership skills. Servant leadership is an approach defined by putting the needs of others, i.e., the team, above oneself. I start by crafting spaces for the team to voice their needs, however basic or undefined. Through that process, we build strong working relationships, and we collaborate on finding resources and assigning action items to achieve collective success. This approach takes lots of listening, intention, and creative strategy, but it has always resulted in outcomes that align individual and business goals. Check out my track record of outstanding and empathetic leadership!
As I gain more experience and lead larger teams, I recognize strong elements of transformational leadership. The hallmark of transformational leadership is a focus on the future. Transformational leaders have a clear future vision, built on the foundation of what the team has already shared and achieved, while looking forward to what the team has the potential to become and do. When a team feels seen and cared for, it is easy to motivate them to explore endlessly, especially when a leader has taken their intrinsic motivations into consideration of the very fabric of the team. I am now in a place where I seek to work in this space more — to help define long-term strategies that lead to team evolution and maturity, which, in turn, helps the business grow and thrive.
Learn more about leadership styles!
Our team’s Operation Peach Plan, aka customer site visits in Atlanta, GA, 2024
Some of My Faves
Food: Asian, Mexican, Italian
Music: R&B, pop, neo-soul, funk, beats- and vocal-driven, special penchant for brass hits
Vibes: Chill, minimalist, comfortable, unique
Gelato flavor: The Signature at Tifa Chocolate & Gelato
Emoji: 🤩
Recent TV Shows: Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Shogun, Couples Therapy
Recent Movies: Past Lives
Music: SZA, Doechii, BTS, Sabrina Carpenter
Dive deeper into my faves!
My current fave dish, hu tieu
One of my fave YouTube neo-soul playlists
One of my fave BTS performances, Idol
Words of the Year
Every year, I try to pick a one-word theme that summarizes the spirit I will intentionally harness my energy to evoke.
My theme for 2024 was Share.
I want to do a better job of sharing customer stories, and sharing the work in progress that is informed by customer stories. I want 2024 to feel fun and free when it comes to experimenting with new and creative ways of telling those stories. I am actively guiding my team to think about how to amplify their research voice, how to optimize their narrative structures, how to make their storytelling feel more natural and conversational, and, most importantly, how to imbue their unending empathy into each story that they tell.
I’ve already starting experimenting with different kinds of sharing. I’m writing about our team in a series called #TeamTuesdays, posted weekly on my LinkedIn and my UX Blog. I’ve encouraged team members to send abstracts and proposals to conferences and seminars. Some of our team members have posted their own articles about UX Research in various online channels. I’m participating in various small-group discussions on management and leadership, which also have social media sharing aspects to them. And our team as a whole has already had several customer-focused, high-profile presentations within Verizon Connect.
My word for 2025? Visibility!
As part of all of my sharing in 2024, I’ve built so many new bridges with new teams. And for folks to get a better understanding of what we do, I want to do a better job at bringing visibility of our work to those teams, and playing back to my team more information from others and their work as well. A great example of this is our collaboration with Sales, Marketing, and Support teams. Showing how we are structured, how we work, and what we’re working on has helped us connect dots across our teams. And showing what our team has learned from Sales, Marketing, and Support, has helped our entire Experience Team think more holistically.
My hope is that anybody who works on my teams or who collaborates with me feels like they’re simply chatting with their user, human to human. I believe that doing this is the ultimate key to a UX Research team’s success!
The Verizon Connect User Experience team based in Atlanta, 2019!
The Verizon Connect User Experience Research Team, plus friends from UX Design and Service Design, from Peach Plan 2024! (Look how much we’ve grown!)
What It’s Like to Work with Me
Over the years, I’ve had incredible chances to work with some really inspiring movers and shakers. I’ve learned so much from them, and I hope that my contributions to our collaborations have been just as meaningful. Thank you to everyone who shared your feedback below — it’s a real joy to get to work with amazing people!
“She continues to impress me in each engagement.”
I've collaborated with Cheryl frequently over the past year, and she continues to impress me in each engagement. As a research leader establishing the function, Cheryl brings an empathetic, thought provoking, and sometimes humorous approach to research that makes the most of her team's extensive talents and backgrounds. She has established systems of foundational and situational knowledge of the customer, while delivering insights in the latest tools so that people across the business can access the data. One of the most stand-out qualities of Cheryl is her ability to reach across teams, departments, levels of leadership to elicit cooperation and collaboration toward shared goals. She's a wonderful colleague.
“She’s an outstanding thinker, doer, and optimistic team leader!”
When I think of Cheryl, I think of the most admired person in the room. Cheryl has an innate ability to lead teams through complex projects, workshops, or really any situation that arises. Her team and others look to her for guidance and support. I've learned from her techniques in developing others around her. I’ve always enjoyed getting her perspective on research methods as well as her approach to team planning. Cheryl has the “no look pass” ability — you know the pass is coming, at the right time, with the right amount of accuracy, right before the team scores the goal. She's an outstanding thinker, doer, and optimistic team leader! I sincerely hope to work with her in the future.
“Cheryl is rigorous, dedicated, and passionate.”
As a researcher, Cheryl is rigorous, dedicated, and passionate. She fights for what she believes and integrates input and new directions with ease.
As a research manager, Cheryl is a true advocate for her team. Her ability to support individuals by guiding them and elevating their skills makes tough projects much easier. Even more, her attitude is infectious, creating a supportive culture across the team that makes work enjoyable every day. She boosts the work of others and provides great feedback to strengthen everyone around her. She exemplifies what great management can be: generous, productive, and supportive.
“Cheryl is a can’t-miss opportunity for your organization.”
Cheryl is an extremely hard-working and conscientious individual who will do well in any job environment. She is very intellectually bright, has outstanding interpersonal skills, and is emotionally stable; she will have no difficulties interacting with fellow employees. Of the nearly 77 PhD students I have mentored, she is in the top 5. Please let me know if you require any other information about this outstanding candidate. She is a “can’t miss” opportunity for your organization.
“I would hire her in a heartbeat.”
I have had the pleasure of working with Ms. Abellanoza for most of her graduate career at UT Arlington - almost 5 years. She was an absolute delight to have working for me as a graduate teaching assistant for several classes. Cheryl has taught several classes and is not only patient, committed, and trustworthy; she always give you her best, does not compromise on quality, and is an excellent team player. She was responsible for grading, designing, and executing various class content. We worked together on multiple class design ideas incorporating her previous clinical experience and recent computer knowledge.
Cheryl also became my coordinator for the undergraduate statistics sequence, which is a heavy workload and demanding of time and effort. Cheryl undertook the responsibility of transforming our grading process to an online format, which I confess I could not have done myself. She not only has excellent programming knowledge but is able to take my ideas and translate those into a fully-formed functioning, usable product that we now have the ability to make available to all our graduate TAs working for me.
Cheryl was also an excellent coordinator of other TAs and is a diplomat. Undergraduate students loved her for her ability to take complex ideas and help them understand. This young lady is an absolute asset to have, honest, hard-working, has mature working habits, and always smiling — I would hire in a heartbeat.
I was thrilled to see her graduate but immensely sorry to see her go after seeing her develop as a professional and person. I wish her every success.
Summary
I am passionate and dedicated to understanding human behavior in all sorts of contexts. I’m learning and growing in so many different ways, and it has been such an interesting journey. Reach out if you’re eager for a chat all things UX Research, but also all things human!