$ 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 I'm particularly proud of — and slightly rueful about. As CTO of Werk, I built technology to make flexible, distributed work not just possible but profitable. Simultaneously, I built and ran Mt. Cleverest as its CEO and CTO — an AI platform to create and evaluate educational content for students learning online. Both were a few years ahead of their time — then a pandemic arrived and the world caught up. Mt. Cleverest was a semifinalist in the IBM Watson AI XPrize, the global AI-for-Good competition.

The pandemic pulled me back into civic service. I helped scale critical healthcare services for hospitals during COVID-19, and that urgency led to my next chapter: recruited as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow and deployed to NASA. Over three and a half years I built MADI, the agency's enterprise platform for AI-assisted document intelligence, and co-authored NASA's Responsible AI Policy in the middle of the post-ChatGPT boom. I also worked on NASA's long-horizon futures research — using AI to imagine how the coming decades could go catastrophically wrong, and the human ingenuity that might avert them — and 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