Almost three years ago to the day, I wrote about my despondency at being in Melbourne, Australia, and feeling disconnected from life. The first time I touched down here, I realized I’d spent my life homesick for a place I’d never been. Melbourne is the place I feel most like myself, or at least I did. In the fullest grip of my depression, Melbourne ceased to be my center. That awareness crushed me.
When I arrived in town last week, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was apprehensive. What if, after all the hours of therapy, self-work, and recovery, my sense of place and belonging was gone forever? Turns out, I needn’t have worried.
As a wise friend suggested on that last, pre-Covid visit, it wasn’t the physical place that made the difference. Rather than being a geographic location, my center moved within me. That internal work has become my anchor and I no longer require the external to find peace. I belong to myself.
Melbourne, I’ve come to understand, wasn’t where I needed to be to feel happy and whole. This place wouldn’t fix me, because I was never broken. Instead, it is something I carry with me. It is all that I can’t leave behind.
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
