Every year my aunt and uncle (my father’s younger brother) host the first night of Passover (i.e., Pesach, for those in the know) at their home in the suburbs of New York City. It serves as the annual family reunion for my father’s side. For obvious reasons, this year was unlike all other years. Instead of being all together, we connected over Zoom. Finding the traditional foodstuffs proved even more challenging this year, requiring that I channel my inner-McGuyver with a dose of terrible wit. Unable to locate a lamb bone, I substituted a sweet potato dubbed “the Pascal Yam.” Generations of my Yiddish comedian ancestors were no doubt kvelling.
It was the most connected to the Exodus story that I have ever felt. Despite the challenges and the anxiety of our present situation, we came out of it last night. It did not stop us from celebrating our history, our faith, our love for one another, and the joy of knowing that we are always together even when we are physically separated.
Published by liz
From history major, with side quests in Medieval Studies and chemical engineering, to nonprofit finance leader, Big 4 tax partner, technologist, researcher, and now co-founder of Divine, nothing about my career has been linear. The throughline has always been systems: financial systems, organizational systems, technological systems, and human systems. I have an MBA in Operations and Supply Chain Management and a PhD in Organizational Leadership Psychology, and I’ve spent my career trying to understand how complex systems shape people’s choices, opportunities, wellbeing, and sense of belonging. Today, my work sits at the intersection of psychology, technology, human-centered design, and digital trust. I am co-founder of Divine, an open-source, decentralized social video app built to put creativity back in human hands and replace doomscrolling with joyscrolling. Divine is part of a bigger question I care deeply about: how do we create online spaces that support safety, creativity, identity, and belonging without defaulting to surveillance, extraction, or control? At Divine, I wear a lot of hats across engineering, finance, operations, and strategy, while helping shape the app’s trust, safety, and values work. I focus especially on teen online safety, human-generated content, participatory design, and healthier relationships with technology. I am a postdoctoral alum of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Computer Science, where I worked with Dr. Pam Wisniewski’s Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab. I continue to write, speak, and research at the intersection of online safety, digital trust, decentralized technology, and youth wellbeing. I was named a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Data Integrity in 2023. In 2025, I had the honor of serving as President of Division 13 of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Consulting Psychology. I also live with major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2020, I took a leave from PwC to focus on my mental wellness, and I now speak and write openly about mental health, especially in the workplace and in relation to digital wellbeing. This blog, Seriously Jerk Brain, chronicles much of that journey.
View all posts by liz
