As a builder, I enjoy working across traditional research boundaries. Neural systems and devices for wellness, a philosophy of belonging, improvising and performing music, burlesque, a stance on whom and how neural data is governed — rather than separating them, I relish exploring how they might mix & mingle for our benefit. Inquiring of each their support of human flourishing, approaching my examination from angles outside the norm and drawing unique connections.

The root is a fascination with consciousness and inner the inner-experience. A yearning to understand how our minds work, heal, and explore. I pursue those questions through genuine rigor and mysticism. The rigor serves something more tender: a firm belief of people deserving equitable access to the tools and spaces to explore themselves and their passion. Science in service of the human experience, and always in that order.

That's why community keeps surfacing as my true project. Underneath the building and the research is a longing for containers where people can be vulnerable together without fear — held together by shared enthusiasm and care rather than by coercion or rules. I've thought hard about how I as an empath sense belonging, which intimates a quietly radical position: that we might design the good that institutions like religion offer — community infrastructure, opportunities for congregation, the sense of home — while designing out the elements of control and organizational self-preservation. While I am skeptical of organized religion and institutions, I am drawn to wondering whether there is a better way?

Running under all of it is a deep instinct to protect people — especially the vulnerable, especially against the lawless, the oppressive, and wealthy colonialist, industrial, and authoritarian powers. Privacy is a human right and moral value. Giving people genuine sovereignty over their minds and data feels inseparable from giving them the freedom to be. It is an ethical stance that today has real technological implications for us all. Do you have a smartphone? You're in.

I value character and integrity above knowledge, skill or advantage — a quiet choice that reveals how I tune my interactions. I always strive to be careful and correct over loud and first. Researching honestly, I label my own certainty, to know where the ground is solid and where it is not than comforting myself in a tidier story.

I possess a restlessness with all this that's both my gift and my challenge. A cross-disciplinary set of interests and passions, some sitting outside societal norms, and a generative mind alive to more possibilities than I may be able to complete within a lifetime — both wealth and a weight. Excited to be at a stage of life where l can do something brave: reconnecting with my birthplace, learning its language and worldview with real humility, taking my ideas and concepts to a place they may flourish.

Connecting it all is this: A vision of science, technology, and community being supportive of our humanity, each one — the vulnerable one, the searching one, the one striving to more fully embody themselves. Striving to find ways through design and collaboration to make this more so is what invigorates me and sustains my hope for our future as a species.