About

I’ve always been curious about people.

I spent my early childhood in Manhattan before my family moved to a sheep farm in Maine. At 19, I went to Kenya to study Swahili. My early career took me into international business and technology, including work with a Taiwanese shipyard.

I loved being dropped into unfamiliar places and figuring out how people with different languages, assumptions and ways of seeing the world could understand one another and work together.

And sometimes, the world came home with me.

I’m also a builder.

I love making ideas tangible so people can react to them, use them and make them better. Recently, that’s meant a microlearning app for nurses and a workshop for a commercial real estate team on how to use AI, not as a replacement for their expertise, but as an amplifier for it.

Years earlier at the Smithsonian, it meant helping visitors understand outbreaks before the pandemic.

I geek out on technology, and I love helping people see it as something that can make their work better, not something to fear.

A few things I believe

  • The stated problem isn’t always the real problem.
  • People support what they help create.
  • A prototype can resolve an argument faster than another meeting.
  • Complexity is often a communication problem.
  • Good work should leave people more capable than you found them.

Joy by Design

That curiosity also has a life outside of work. Joy by Design is a small community and body of work I created for people exploring how to live with more coherence and joy. It’s where I write, experiment and bring people together around the messy business of being human.