Remember the name

liz

Yesterday morning, as the sun rose, my aunt died peacefully in a hospital in Rutland, Vermont. She was 76 years old. Even though I know everything I just typed is true, it does not feel real.

We spent a lot of time with her growing up. Some of my earliest memories are of her home in Flatbush, before she moved to the house in Midwood. It had been the home of her child best friend, Emily. Emily’s father, a doctor, had used the first floor as a private medical office. The family had lived upstairs, on the second and third floors. My aunt continued that tradition, situating her private investigation business in the first-floor apartment. That’s what she did after leaving nursing, her calling in life, but a job that didn’t give her enough time with her children as a single mother.

She was a dynamo. El Al Airlines hired her to secure their cargo in New York. However, the work she was most proud of related to her advocacy for missing, abused, and exploited children. Countless lives were saved because of her.

Dan Rather interviewed her. CNN sought out her expertise. President Reagan gave a speech praising her as an entrepreneur and advocate. She even appeared on Regis and Kathie Lee.

Despite battling Multiple Sclerosis for over 40 years, she never gave up. The disease never defined her. People from all over the world heard her story and reached out to her for hope and encouragement.

What I will remember most, though, are the many happy Christmases in her home. I will remember turning to her for advice. I will remember being in her den and her looking over at my boyfriend, telling me that we make decisions about where we live based not on geography, but on the people who feel like home (Reader, I married him).

She was fierce in every sense of the word. I will miss her forever.

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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.

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