When you bombard nuclear fuel, like Uranium-238 enriched with Uranium-235, with neutrons you create a process called nuclear fission. Nuclear fission releases byproducts, including Iodine-131, Cesium-137, and Strontium-90. These radioactive leftovers stick around and emit (often dangerous) levels of radiation for variable amounts of time. The unit of measure for this process of radioactive decay is called a half-life. It represents the amount of time it takes for a given quantity to reduce its value by half.
Recently, I’ve come to think about my emotional responses in terms of their half-lives. The initial feeling can be overwhelming but dissipate quickly, like Iodine-131 which has a half-life of eight days. Alternatively, the sensation can linger and evolve. Plutonium-241, for instance, has a half-life of 14.4 years, but it decays into Americium-241 which sticks around much longer. It’s half life is 430 years. Some days, it seems like I will feel my feelings forever. I’ve found that disappointment and frustration tend to start out like Plutonium-241, before decaying into anger, resentment, and hurt, that perpetuate like Americium-241. Joy, happiness, and gratitude often resemble Iodine-131. I will now stop torturing this analogy.
I’m working on recalibrating my internal scales for how I experience and work through my emotions to try and smooth out variability in how my feelings affect me and for how long. It’s a process.
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?! 
Helpful image – thank you, Liz.
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