About

I'm a builder who ended up with a philosophy Ph.D., which is not the typical path into AI development.

My career has had a few distinct chapters. I started in corporate leadership, spending about ten years at companies like Volvo AB and Danaher Inc. in various finance and marketing roles. I learned a lot about how organizations actually function, what motivates people, and how hard it is to get teams aligned around shared goals.

That experience made me curious about deeper questions, which eventually led me back to graduate school. I did my Ph.D. at Baylor, focusing on virtue ethics and the psychology of ownership. I became particularly interested in what makes people flourish and how character develops over time. After finishing, I spent several years at Harvard's Human Flourishing Program, eventually serving as Executive Director.

In 2024 I wrote a book called Ownership Unlocked, which drew on research into psychological ownership to help leaders build more engaged teams. I built a workshop business around it for a while, though that's not my focus anymore.

These days I'm a Strategic Advisor at Baylor's Institute for Global Human Flourishing, where I work on research coordination, partnerships, and increasingly on building AI tools for our work. Outside of Baylor, I take on projects that interest me, primarily RAG systems, workflow automation, and AI prototypes.

On the philosophy thing

People sometimes ask how the philosophy background connects to building AI tools. The honest answer is that it shapes how I think about systems more than what I build day to day.

When you spend years studying virtue ethics and human flourishing, you develop habits of asking what something is for, what it optimizes, what it might inadvertently break. That's useful when you're building tools that affect how people work and live. I'm currently writing a paper on how classical frameworks for moral formation might inform AI alignment, which lets me bring these threads together more explicitly.

Still, I'm a builder at heart. When you work with me, you get working software. The philosophy is in the background, shaping how I approach problems, but the deliverable is always something that runs.