Public servant. Professor.
Founder.

I grew up in Dayton, Ohio, and at sixteen I earned a place in one of the finest cooperative education programs in the country, at the Patterson Career Center. The rhythm was demanding and it was real: two weeks of school, two weeks of work, all year long. My major was business, but my classroom was the working world. I spent my junior and senior years as a project assistant at the world headquarters of NCR, studying the machinery of business up close while my peers were still reading about it in textbooks. The work spoke for itself. The year I graduated high school, I was hired as a credit analyst at Bank One.

Dayton gave me something else. It is the city where the Wright brothers taught the world to fly. Two brothers from my own hometown looked at the sky and refused to accept its limits, and that idea never left me: the point of any skill is to help people go further than they thought they could.

When I came to Washington, DC, I started in the law. I worked in law firms as a Senior Paralegal and Litigation Support Specialist, learning how careful, principled work protects ordinary people in the highest-stakes moments of their lives. That apprenticeship opened the door to federal service.

In 2008 I became Deputy in Charge of Operations at a U.S. District Court, my first real lesson in public administration: the unglamorous craft of making a public institution run well enough to serve the people who depend on it. From there I supported federal legal and law enforcement offices, the IRS Office of Chief Counsel from 2009 to 2011 and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from 2012 to 2023, where I served in senior roles. At Homeland Security my work shifted from supporting a legal office to supporting law enforcement through data and IT, governing the information and systems that investigators and agents rely on.

Today I am a steward of data and trust inside a federal financial services regulatory agency, an institution built to protect the public by enforcing the rules that keep the system fair. The work is careful, quiet, and built around the public good. Good governance is not glamorous, but it protects people, and protecting people is the part I have always loved. The credit analyst who once studied risk for a bank now helps safeguard the systems the public depends on, with a focus on data governance, AI ethics, and federal IT policy.

My instinct to serve did not stay at the office. Having come up through the doctoral path myself, I have served as a dissertation research supervisor in business, IT, and AI, guiding more than 120 candidates to the finish line across five universities. I chose to teach AI ethics because I believe artificial intelligence must always be balanced by human intelligence, and that the question of who technology serves, and who it forgets, is too important to leave to the machines.

It followed me across land and sea. When I founded Voyage and Vibe Travel, I could have chased only the easy luxury market. Instead I built accessibility into the foundation. The seed had been planted years earlier in Dayton, when I volunteered at the Mary Scott Nursing Center and learned how much it matters to simply show up for the elderly. As I have gotten older, I have watched how readily society can discard its seniors, and I decided I would do the opposite. So I thought about the travelers who get left out: people with mobility needs, older adults navigating new technology, the Baby Boomers who have earned the trip of a lifetime and deserve to take it in comfort.

Two commitments sit at the center of my life: lift up our seniors, and open the door for everyone climbing the path behind me. I have stood on both sides of that doorway. A teenager once given a real chance through a Dayton co-op, I now spend my days widening it: for the doctoral candidates I guide to the finish line, for the young people Urban Smart reaches, and for the elders my younger self learned to honor in a nursing home hallway. Urban Smart, the nonprofit I co-founded to advance STEAM education, digital literacy, and innovation in underserved communities, is the natural extension of the co-op door that was once opened for me.

From a co-op job in Dayton to a doctorate, from a law firm to federal service, from a classroom to the open sea, the bearing never changed. Service comes first. Everything else is just another way to serve, and another way to help people go further.