Hello! I'm Advait Gadre.

My path into design didn't start with design — it started with a B.S. in Psychological & Brain Sciences from UC Santa Barbara (2021), studying how people think before I ever studied how they interact with products. When I first decided to move into UX, there was no program handing me the tools; I taught myself through online courses and personal projects, piecing together the foundation I needed to really take off.

That self-taught instinct carried into the Human-Computer Interaction graduate program at UC Santa Cruz (2023–2024), where much of my technical fluency in tools like Figma came from self-teaching alongside the coursework. Weekly seminars from industry professionals kept the focus on how UX actually works inside a company, not just in theory.

My capstone with Augment Therapy — the project behind my M.S. in HCI (Dec 2024) — is where that theory became practice. Weeks of hands-on user research taught me to let real findings drive design decisions, not just support them.

I graduated into a UX field that was rapidly being reshaped by AI, month to month. As the sole designer at a startup, I had full ownership from day one — no existing playbook to follow, just the process I'd built and the pressure to make it work fast. That pushed another round of self-teaching: rapid prototyping, building and maintaining a design system, generating LLM-powered functionality, and thriving in Agile sprints rather than just keeping up.

The throughline: at every stage, I have taken the initiative to learn new tools and techniques as they evolved with the field and I built the process that worked best for me and my work. Years of that learning and trial and error have shaped the toolkit I now lead product development with — taking ideas from 0 to 1 in this age of AI, with systems thinking and scalable design remaining at the core of my process and principles.

I channel my love for detail and strategy into the dynamic world of competitive and all-star cheer. As a competitive coach, I drive my teams to achieve remarkable feats. The discipline I instill in my athletes mirrors the meticulous attention to detail I bring to every UX project.

Whether it's crafting a seamless app interface or coaching a winning team, I bring the same level of dedication and excellence—leading my groups from brand-new athletes in the sport to sitting at the very top of the statewide leaderboard.