Over the course of my life, I have both experienced and borne witness to grief and depression. At times they visited separately, at others they’ve shown up together. Always, they were unbidden and unwelcome guests.
I’ve found them to be like a rock in my pocket, brown and smooth and shaped like a robin’s egg. I can forget the rock is there for days, weeks, even months at a time. But, inevitably, it asserts its presence at the most inopportune moments. Reaching into the folds of fabric for my car keys, I grab the rock instead and it transports me instantly to the pit of emptiness, where the walls are lined with the thick, wet moss of all the life I missed living. It is a cold place, but I am numb.
In this season of my life, I am seeing the familiar faces of grief and depression around me. Those I love who are dealing with the loss of what was, what could have been, and what may never be.
There is nothing I can do to take away the hurt, none of us can. What we can do is create and hold space for those who are hurting to feel seen, heard, and loved. That is how we push past the darkness and into the light.
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?! 