I earned my doctorate in physics at The Pennsylvania State University, working within an international effort to make magnetic resonance imaging affordable and widely deployable. My research developed new ways of encoding the signal so that a low-field scanner — the kind that could plausibly exist outside a major hospital — could still produce brain images clear enough to be clinically useful.

Since finishing, I've worked as a data scientist, a predictive sports modeler, and a research software engineer. I'm currently building my own quantitative research practice. What these have in common is that knowing this material well is what made them available to me — and I still use it daily.

For six years at Penn State I taught the introductory calculus-based physics sequence — the same two semesters engineering and science majors take, and the ones that function as gatekeeping courses for both. Between that, earlier tutoring work, and one-on-one students since, I've taught somewhere north of a thousand students. As a perpetual student myself, I've never stopped noticing how much depends on finding the right teacher at the right moment.

What keeps me doing it is that one-on-one is the only setting where you can see the actual misunderstanding — not the wrong answer, but the belief underneath that produced it. In a lecture hall of two hundred you can't get to that. In an hour with one student you almost always can.