A cognitive scientist who builds products.
I started in a Minneapolis classroom, trained in cognition and learning, and spent the last decade turning ambiguous problems into shipped, measured products.
I taught composition and speech in Minneapolis Public Schools for ten years before earning a Ph.D. in cognition, motivation and learning at the University of Minnesota. Two postdoctoral fellowships at McMaster University followed — first in software engineering, then in behavioral neuroscience — and I directed the GScale Mixed Reality Lab there.
Since 2015 I have worked as a principal researcher and product lead for Amazon, Walmart Global Tech, Equinix, Nielsen, American Family, BOLD and others, usually as the only senior person on the problem. The work runs from ethnography on a store floor to mixed-effects models of rater agreement, and it ends in a product decision.
In 2023 I founded Maetri, which builds AI for decisions where being confidently wrong is expensive, starting in care settings. The work has produced two patent filings: one on interpreting multimodal physical signals, one on an adaptive trust architecture. I teach at Claremont Graduate University and am an affiliated principal scientist at McMaster’s Gilbrea Centre for Studies in Aging.
