$ whoami

About

I'm a technologist, public-policy expert, speaker, and executive advisor working at the edge of applied AI.

Across both parties, I've served three White House administrations, hold three U.S. cryptography patents, and built one of NASA's first enterprise-scale generative AI platforms.

My career started in Washington as a Presidential Management Fellow at the Department of Defense — working on large-scale procurement and data analysis at the Pentagon. That work took me to the Middle East, deployed on behalf of the Joint Chiefs to analyze troop movement data across CENTCOM, and then to the White House, where I served as a liaison between the U.S. Navy and the Japanese government during the Fukushima nuclear crisis. From there I moved to the Department of Justice, advising the CTO's office on IT procurement across the entire department.

Then I changed direction, rebuilding my career around product and engineering. I joined a series of startups and spent years traveling — Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Israel, the UK — working with major banks to advance mobile cryptography. As VP of Product at Uniken (now Ditto), I co-developed three U.S. patents, and a hard-won appreciation for what it takes to ship financial infrastructure at global scale.

Next came two startups. As CTO of Werk, I built technology to make flexible and remote work not just possible but profitable for Fortune 1000 companies. Simultaneously, I built and ran Mt. Cleverest as its CEO and lead technologist — an online textbook that self-improved the more it was used, primarily serving students online. Mt. Cleverest was ultimately named a semifinalist in the IBM Watson AI XPrize, the global AI-for-Good competition — one of my proudest achievements. The theses behind both companies were 100% correct — just a few years ahead of their time. Then a pandemic arrived and the world caught up.

The pandemic pulled me back into civic service. I helped scale a healthcare platform to deliver COVID-19 results and critical patient data for roughly 2–4% of the country, and that urgency led to my next chapter: recruited as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow and deployed to NASA. My team at NASA was a group of futurists within the Convergent Aeronautics Solutions (CAS) project, whose charge was imagining thousands of dystopian futures over the next fifty years and using engineering and human ingenuity to nudge humanity toward better outcomes. It was incredibly interesting work. As the Head of Digital Innovation and AI for CAS, over three and a half years I built MADI — a generative-AI platform that strengthens researchers' strategic foresight, helping them connect ideas across disparate fields to find novel solutions to wicked problems. I also advised NASA's CTO office and co-authored the agency's Responsible AI Policy in the middle of the post-ChatGPT boom. Along the way I co-hosted NASA's Ecosystemic Futures Podcast.

Teaching has been the constant throughout. I've taught and trained widely, and more formally as a lecturer in cybersecurity and digital policy at UVA's Batten School graduate program. I hold a B.S. in Engineering and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Virginia, and an MBA from MIT Sloan.

What I Do Now

I speak to senior executives and government leaders on AI strategy through Envoy Executive Programs, and advise early-stage startups at the intersection of AI, security, and energy. My focus: helping organizations move from AI curiosity to AI capability — responsibly and at scale.

The thread across everything: I've shipped software in environments where failure has real consequences — federal agencies, healthcare, financial infrastructure — and I help teams bring that discipline to emerging technology.

Career Highlights