James Heldridge
Building at the intersection of AI and design.
Overview
Design Engineer @NCITE
Social Links
About
I'm James, a Product Designer at NCITE specializing in Human-Centered AI. With a background spanning user research, design, and full-stack development, I build collaborative AI systems that put people first.
My expertise spans React, TypeScript, and Spring Boot, delivering thoughtful, user-focused solutions — from research platforms and AI-powered tools to complex data-driven interfaces. As a graduate researcher at NCITE, I work at the intersection of participatory design and technical implementation, turning research insights into impactful, well-architected products.
Driven by interdisciplinary curiosity, I love exploring how humans and AI can work together effectively, tackling complex sociotechnical problems, and creating software that feels intuitive and makes a real difference.
GitHub Contributions
Stack
Research(2)
Published at HICSS 2026. A systematic review of 38 peer-reviewed studies examining AI integration throughout the assessment lifecycle across critical infrastructure, finding that government facilities and healthcare settings accounted for more than 70% of all documented use cases.
MS thesis in Human Centered Computing. Applies Design Science Research to build a RAG-based AI expert system that scaffolds non-expert school administrators through security risk assessments, grounded in Task-Technology Fit theory.
Experience
- Designing and engineering a full-stack risk assessment platform end-to-end for a DHS-funded national security initiative — owning UI/UX design, system architecture, and database infrastructure.
- Building multi-agent AI workflows with Claude API to automate threat analysis for K-12 schools nationwide.
- Shipping production interfaces with React and Next.js, grounded in user research and security-first principles.
- Claude API
- React
- Next.js
- Python
- NLP
- C
- DSP
- Signal Processing
- Systems Programming
- Audio Engineering
- IT Infrastructure
Education
- Human-Centered Design
- Agentic AI
- UX Research
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Python
- Audio Engineering
- DSP
- C
- Python
- Creative Computing
Projects(2)
A full-stack risk assessment platform for K-12 schools nationwide, built at DHS's National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE) as part of a $35M federally funded initiative. I own the entire product surface — UI/UX design in Figma, frontend in React and Next.js, backend APIs, database architecture in PostgreSQL, and multi-agent AI workflows with Claude API. Security-first by design.
- React
- Next.js
- PostgreSQL
- Claude API
- Figma
- UX Research
An agentic system that autonomously crawls and analyzes web content for risk indicators using local LLMs. Built with Python for orchestration and data processing, enabling automated threat assessment without reliance on external API calls.
- Python
- Local LLM
- Web Scraping
- NLP
- Risk Analysis