From the football field to the neuroscience lab, my journey is defined by one question: What are the biological limits of healing, and how can we engineer past them?
My path to engineering didn't start in a classroom—it started with a shoulder injury. In 2012, and again in 2015, I underwent Latarjet procedures to repair 360-degree labrum tears. I was an 18-year-old football player with a singular goal: heal fast enough to play again.
I felt the despair of having something I loved stripped away, but I also found agency in that pain. I got hurt doing what I loved, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. But during those long weeks in a sling, I became obsessed with a question: Why?
I read scientific articles on shoulder rehab protocols, challenging the "six-week" dogma. What is the biological limitation? How can we accelerate this? Around this time, the game Deus Ex: Human Revolution was released. It introduced me to the concept of neural prosthetics—the idea that we could engineer our way past biological failure.
The fiction of Deus Ex inspired me, but the reality of graduate school grounded me. I realized that while we weren't ready for sci-fi level prosthetics due to biocompatibility issues, the real frontier was neural decoding.
I pivoted from motor prosthetics to the internal world of the brain. My PhD work focused on sharp-wave ripples—the brain's mechanism for memory consolidation and learning. But as I decoded the brain's signals, I began to struggle with my own.
This is the question that drives everything I do.
Like many in their 20s, I faced my own battles with obsessive thoughts, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), and depression. I found myself asking: If the brain is a machine for survival, why does it produce solutions that aren't productive for the individual?
My research goal is to bridge the gap between neuroscience and wellbeing. I aim to study mental health disorders (anxiety, depression, OCD) and engineer therapeutic interventions—combining technological feedback with psychotherapy—to not just "fix" pathology, but to promote cerebral wellness.
In a global structure where scientific information is frequently siloed for profit, the act of making research data and protocols accessible is more than just best practice—it is a form of systemic activism. My commitment to Open Science is rooted in the conviction that barriers to entry in biotechnology and engineering—whether they are financial paywalls, proprietary "gatekeeping," or opaque methodology—actively slow the progress of medical innovation and exclude diverse perspectives.
By providing open-access resources, I aim to:
Active open-source research repositories:
A Note on Humility:
I have had the privilege of working with mathematicians, engineers, and statisticians far more brilliant than myself. I understand that my work is never finished and rarely perfect. If you have insights on how to analyze this data differently, or if you spot mistakes in my protocols, please reach out. I want to learn, improve, and explore further. Curiosity and the willingness to adapt to new information are vital for our progress as a community.
My philosophy in the classroom mirrors my philosophy in the lab: Mistakes are data points, not failures.
"If someone makes a mistake in life or academics and they are judged, evaluated, and punished without an opportunity to correct their mistake, how does that foster learning?"
I am more than the sum of my research. I am a former explosive athelte (football player and sprinter---neither of which required a high VO2 max) who transitioned into long-distance running (completed 2 halfie marathons so far!) and rock climbing. Why? Because I love the friction of a new challenge, especially when it involves mastering things I wasn't naturally built for.
My home life is its own kind of laboratory. I spend my time cleaning up after and training my pet rabbits to perform complex, multi-level tasks and—in my most ambitious behavioral experiment yet—training a Boxer/Pitbull mix puppy with my girlfriend to abandon her prey drive and become a calming protector for the bunnies.
Other variables in the equation: