The ideas belong to anyone who can use them.
I am a researcher, educator, and writer. I work at the intersection of psychology, systems thinking, and what it actually takes to change something.
In 2009, I lost my brother, my niece, and my closest friend within two years of each other. I was an astrophysicist in the Air Force at the time, working toward goals I had held since I was eleven years old. I quit my PhD program the day after the last loss, left the career I had spent my adult life building, and started over. I am not sure I would describe it as a choice. It felt more like the only thing that made sense.
“I could not reach the end of my life without having done something to make things better. That is not ambition. It is closer to a debt.”
I entered the Educational Psychology doctoral program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa with a question that had been nagging at me since those losses: could the kind of transformation that comes from surviving something terrible — the expanded empathy, the shift in values, the genuine sense of connection to other people — be cultivated deliberately, without the trauma? My dissertation found that it could. That you could teach people toward a more transcendent way of being in the world. That it was not a personality trait or a spiritual gift. It was learnable. That finding has been the thread running through everything I have done since.
What I do is read widely across disciplines — psychology, economics, education, history, organizational behavior — and write about what connects them. Not to give you a framework. Not to build awareness, a phrase I find almost physically painful because it is usually a way of sounding purposeful while committing to nothing. I write to give you something you can carry with you and actually use.
The people I most want to reach are the ones who already sense that something is wrong — at work, in their city, in the institutions they move through every day — but have not yet found the language for it, or a direction to push. I write for the person who is almost ready to do something. I want to be what gets them the rest of the way there.
I am, for what it is worth, a Star Trek Buddhist. If that means something to you, you are probably in the right place.
BACKGROUND
PhD, Educational Psychology — University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 2017
Former astrophysicist and officer, U.S. Air Force
Researcher in self-transcendence development, motivation, and systems change
Based in Hawaiʻi