Title: Vice President, Strategy
Tenure: 9 years
Why Public Service: Helping public agencies make better decisions is meaningful to Sianna because of her deep personal connection to public service through family and friends in the public sector.
Superpower: Turning ambiguity into actionable insights through creative research design and collaborative problem-solving.
What She Loves Most About This Work: The Challenge. Finding innovative ways to answer complex research questions when there isn’t an obvious path forward.
What Makes Her Work Fulfilling: Relationships. Building trusted relationships with clients and partners while helping create meaningful impact in communities.
“It’s really special to have colleagues with such a wide variety of backgrounds and expertise but a shared desire to do work that makes a tangible difference in our communities.”
Recognizing Impact Through Leadership
This spotlight feature comes at an exciting moment in Sianna’s EMC journey. Recently promoted to Vice President, Strategy, she continues to lead with curiosity, creativity and a commitment to helping clients make informed decisions that drive community impact.
Featured Project:
Rethinking Driver Safety in San Francisco
One project demonstrates both Sianna’s creativity and EMC’s commitment to custom research design.
Working with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority (SFMTA) and a communications partner, EMC was tasked with helping inform a public education campaign focused on safer left turns.
At the time, left-turn collisions accounted for approximately 40% of pedestrian traffic deaths in San Francisco.
Before developing a baseline survey, Sianna and her team recognized a challenge: they didn’t fully understand what drivers were experiencing in those moments before making an unprotected left turn.
So they started somewhere unusual.
Using Real Driver Footage to Reveal “Blind Spots”
The project team filmed real intersections from a driver’s perspective while waiting for an opportunity to make a left turn. EMC then incorporated those videos into an online qualitative study with San Francisco drivers.
Participants were asked to imagine themselves behind the wheel and describe everything they noticed after watching the footage.
The exercise revealed something important.
Drivers differed in what they focused on when preparing to turn left. Some actively looked for a gap in pedestrians crossing the street, while others were focused on finding a break in oncoming traffic. This difference in perspective was confirmed in the baseline survey. Understanding these different decision-making patterns gave the team valuable insight into how drivers assess risk in the moments before turning.
That insight became critical to shaping the campaign’s messaging.
By identifying how different drivers perceived risk, the team was able to create research-informed recommendations that encouraged safer behavior and increased awareness of pedestrian safety.
Left Turn Focus
In the baseline survey, drivers were almost perfectly split when it comes to whether they are most focused on a break in oncoming traffic or a break in crossing pedestrians.
Impact:
The resulting campaign generated more than 76 million impressions across San Francisco, and 24% of residents in the tracking survey recalled seeing the campaign.
Why It Matters:
For Sianna, this project reflects EMC Research’s approach to solving complex challenges: start with curiosity, embrace uncertainty and design research around the problem rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all methodology.