Creative Problem-Solver

"The great secret of education is to combine mental and physical work so that one kind of exercise refreshes the other" -- Jean Jacques Rousseau I love analytics, and I love presentation. That's why I chose to major in Quantitative Social Science in college. The liberal arts program at Dartmouth provided a perfect feast for my inter-disciplinary interests. While exploring what Dartmouth had to offer, I also picked up minors in Public Policy and Middle Eastern Studies with a focus on Arabic language. I've worked in tech, and am currently a consultant. I love the full process of analyze, prepare, present. In tech, that was building (start-to-finish) tools that were incredibly easy to use and valuable time-savers, and then rolling them out to users. In consulting, that means interviewing experts, researching, synthesizing complex information and then presenting it in an easy-to-understand way. Outside of 9-5, I love reading about food, nature, and neuroscience/psychology; I also love working with my hands. I have a passion for woodworking (and generally building things), as well as cooking. I find that if I can incorporate one of those two into my day, then I've had a great day. Bonus points for both.

We are in a new era of information. The intellectual problem of our age is shifting from access to information to the intentional synthesis and presentation of information. Some refer to this as optimizing for "cognitive ease." There is a risk, however, of making things "cognitively easy." From social media to unhealthy eating habits, we can see how choosing the easy neural pathway can be detrimental. On the other hand, a 1993-style clunky user-interface is an unpleasant interaction these days. The art of hitting the sweet spot is making people feel informed and aggregating the best information from the most insightful sources. For example, I think that Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell does a fantastic job of this. How can we rigorously research a topic and then communicate that content in the most optimal way? That's a question I love thinking about.