What makes me tick

Innovative technology is animated by its effects of disruption. I believe this word deserves scrutiny. Rooted in technology, economics, and behavioral science, my passions are guided by innovation’s capacity to uplift those often overlooked. From my upbringing in South Dakota to my digital ethics work at Carnegie Mellon, this principle matured uphill against many landscapes of moral myopia and techno-optimistic dissent.

As an immigrant in a Midwest farming town, I witnessed how disparities in technical access were stratified by socioeconomic status, leaving small landowners and indigenous communities devoid of tools to compete in a data-centric economy. Attempting to address this imbalance, I founded FarmOne, a startup that helps farmers save money and build a sustainable future with smarter energy solutions. Growing a team of over 16 talented software engineers, data scientists, and sustainable financiers, we built a Unified Operating Picture (UOP) of facility performance benchmarks and energy efficiency models to bundle capex decisions. Confronting the magnitude of this issue was formatively challenging, but our team’s thesis of combining (1) unified, standardized and science-based view of climate risk, (2) renewable technology brokering, and (3) AI and automation tools generated over $2M in operating savings, emboldening my belief in the promise of inclusive innovation. I also directed Funding Reservation Education Equality (FREE), a nonprofit dedicated to improving K-12 education standards and living conditions on Native American Reservations, which raised over $50K and 4,000 books.

At Carnegie Mellon University, I pursued internationally-leading business information systems and behavioral economics research to explore the interplay between human decision-making and digital ecosystems. Intrigued by Herbert Simon’s attention economics work, I investigated attention utility online under the mentorship of Dr. George Loewenstein. Translating 2K-participant surveys into a model of online consumer habits, my study culminated in a framework to enrich choice architectures online and a methodology to protect behavioral data rights. I advanced these approaches in a 5,000-word paper inspired by Shoshana Zuboff’s behavioral surplus concept, arguing against search engine’s underhanded use of behavioral collateral data to develop the next evolution of AI-driven subjugation systems. 

The dawning of mainstream AI turned my attention towards the future. My senior thesis repurposed my human decision-making motivations into a call to safeguard autonomy and the capture of neurodata, humanity’s most vulnerable source of information, in the development of AI-led brain-computer interfaces.

Continuing my research at the University of Cambridge, I conduct alignment research with esteemed collaborators at the Center for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), and publish articles covering AI economics, developer adoption, and ethical training considerations, influencing over 1,000 academic researchers and industry practitioners. In the past few weeks, I have been helping to produce a whitepaper on an inclusive, data-centric machine learning design method democratizing models with value-sensitive curation and selection. I’m also stress-testing my ideas by producing thought leadership work on machine learning policy and AI ethics with my research professors, notably Dr. Kerry McInerny and Dr. Eleanor Drage. Finally, I'm a Responsible Technology Fellow at All Tech Is Human, where I'm writing a whitepaper on improving localized access to community-based computer vision systems.

At Peru Consulting, I advise Fortune 500 companies on AI product strategy and alignment challenges, focusing on large-scale LLM projects and enterprise solutions. I led the development and roadmap for 0-to-1 AI products, including a healthcare chatbot serving 9 million users, enabling 20,000 hours of cognitive behavioral therapy through data-driven personalization and privacy benchmarks. I’ve also built AI-driven platforms for clients in banking and healthcare, generating $162M in enterprise value while addressing critical gaps in user representation and operational efficiency.

In corporate tech, I’ve worked at Amazon Web Services as a Program Manager Intern on the Cloud Engineering and Training & Certification teams and served for two years as the AWS University Project Manager and Venture Scout for early-stage startups at Carnegie Mellon, securing over $200K in seed funding for breakthrough technologies.

Thank you for reading! I hope you’ll stay posted and revisit as I continue to populate ongoing projects, writings, and other snippets worth sharing.

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