The Through-Line
I came up in advertising, went to grad school convinced that software should do the work for us so we can be more human with each other, and spent the next twenty years proving it.
I wasn't interested in technology for its own sake — I was interested in what it could free us to do. I taught myself to code. I stayed up all night writing programs. I was hooked.
A bicycle accident left my partner with a traumatic brain injury. Our shared reality collapsed. As his mind struggled to rebuild, mine was forced to process an uncomfortable truth.
Survival — and success — isn't about intelligence. It's about how resilient your mind is when everything falls apart.
I went deep into positive psychology, applied neuroscience, linguistics, and behavioral science. I became a coach — helping creators, leaders, and founders strengthen the most overlooked system of all: the human mind.
Coaching people over time revealed that we all have similar tendencies, and clear patterns emerged. Using dialogue to help a client see their own patterns taught me more than any classroom could. Our thoughts and words create our worlds.
I kept building. When large language models emerged, I recognized them immediately — not as a trend, but as the tool I had always needed.
Taking accurate notes during a coaching session pulled me away from being fully present. So I built an app that captured each utterance, analyzed it, plotted it, and highlighted the client's own language back to me in real time.
I combine dialogic intelligence with software systems to improve how humans interact with them. I built Paloma — an AI coaching companion with a 5-layer relational memory architecture, behavioral guardrails, and a design philosophy built on psychological safety.
I evolved Field Guide from a paper survey into agentic research infrastructure — NIH-funded, multi-agent, with fatigue detection, real-time contradiction flagging, and longitudinal memory across years.
I don't just design products. I design the relationship between humans and the systems built to serve them.