Yesterday evening, I had the chance to record a conversation with Mitch Wallis for his Heart On My Sleeve podcast. It was an awesome dialog and I can’t wait to share the episode when it drops.
One of the questions he asked has stayed on my mind. He brought up the process of sense-making, how our brains interpret information to create a whole picture out of a collection of parts. The technical term for the study and methods of interpretation is hermeneutics. He asked me why I thought it was such a satisfying mental process. We are always so pleased with ourselves when we make sense of something puzzling us.
I like this question on a number of levels. Cognitive processes are fascinating to me from an academic perspective. Personally, I recognize the way my brain works to figure out what is happening around me and inform how I act. To make sense of why making sense of something is such a good feeling is also a delightfully meta exercise.
As I’ve pondered it more, I have realized that understanding what we observe helps us to act in ways that maximize our well-being. For a long time I was so disengaged from living that I couldn’t actively participate in making sense of anything. Now I can. There is great satisfaction in being fully engaged with life.
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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I think it probably also makes us more efficient at evaluating new information, because there’s a framework to slot it into.
I think it probably also makes us more efficient at evaluating new information, because there’s a framework to slot it into.
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