About

I work at the intersection of AI development and human flourishing research. I do both, deliberately, and the combination is the point. Most of what I find interesting lives in the gap between them.

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.

I also wrote a book on psychological ownership in 2024, Ownership Unlocked.

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

My most recent piece of writing is The 2031 Crisis in Higher Education, a scenario analysis of how demographic decline and AI-driven labor market collapse could reshape American higher education.

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.

It still surprises me how much the philosophy helps when I'm building AI systems. The philosophy shapes what I think AI systems should be for; the building keeps the philosophy from drifting into abstraction. The output is software that runs and arguments that hold up.