About 15 months ago, I entered a new season in my career. After years in finance-focused professional services, I took a leap and joined an edtech start up. Last month, the company went on indefinite hiatus. Although it is a pretty significant event for me, it isn’t the same shock to the system that I experienced when I left consulting. I
’m fortunate in that this isn’t a crisis for me. Nor is it necessarily a bump in the road. I have arrived at a crossroads and down each path I can take are great possibilities and unknown-as-of-now challenges. It’s inviting me into a place of experimentation and iteration.
Starting this Friday (and for the subsequent two Fridays following), I’m going to be teaching a 3-part course for LifeBound. LifeBound helps students of all ages, stages, and backgrounds achieve personal and professional success.
The class will equip business people and faculty members to support students and recent graduates in sharpening their employment skills by mastering powerful questions, navigating ambiguity, designing their future, and unleashing their power to make their dreams a reality. Coaching is the key to self-management, self-motivation, and effective relationships.
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?! 