Today is a pretty special day in our family. First, it is my parents wedding anniversary. (Congratulations, Mommy and Daddy!). I think it’s number 46, but as my father would say, who’s counting?
It is also my grandmother’s birthday. If she was still alive, she would be turning 118. She was born during Teddy Roosevelt’s first term as president. The year before, he assumed the office after McKinley’s assassination.
A month before her 18th birthday, the 19th Amendment was ratified. Her life spanned the entirety of the 20th century and the start of the 21st. She saw some of the greatest advancements and breakthroughs, but also endured very dark times. She was a survivor in every sense of the word. Her death, just shy of her 102nd birthday, felt like an impossibility to me. She had always endured. It is still strange to think of this world without her. I miss her.
Just before she turned 100, she wrote an ethical will. The document was intended to be a synthesis of the wisdom of her accumulated years. I return to it frequently, because of the way in which she was able to communicate hope in the midst of what must have seemed at many times in her life to be crushing despair and uncertainty.
At her funeral, my father ended his eulogy with these words, “There may be a day when you find you can’t go on, when it’s all too much, when you have no strength left, nothing left to give, and all the encouragement in the world is just words. But you will go on anyway. She will be there. Because she is Grandma. Because she loves you. Because you too will want her to be proud of you.”
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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Seriously, Jerk Brain?! 
God bless my baby.
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