I teach students, build programs, and occasionally ask institutions why they're making everything so unnecessarily difficult.
I'm a faculty member at Foothill College, where I direct Tools for Transition & Work, a college and career readiness program for neurodivergent young adults. I also work in curriculum leadership and am pursuing a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University.
Most of my work comes back to one question: What would education look like if we designed it around the people actually using it?
Disabled and neurodivergent students don't need to become someone else to deserve a future. They need opportunities, meaningful support, real expectations, and the freedom to figure out who they want to be.
Unfortunately, education has an impressive talent for confusing compliance with learning, independence with isolation, and difference with deficiency.
I'm interested in changing that. Sometimes through teaching, sometimes through research or advocacy, and sometimes by noticing that a supposedly complicated problem could be fixed by writing a clearer email.
The goal isn't to sand off every interesting edge until students look "normal." It's to help people build lives that actually belong to them.
I direct Tools for Transition & Work at Foothill College, where we help neurodivergent young adults develop the academic, social, professional, and practical skills needed to build their own futures.
I also develop curriculum, teach, and spend a great deal of time thinking about how to make education more effective without making it more complicated.
I'm involved in curriculum leadership, disability advocacy, educational research, and a variety of projects aimed at making institutions more accessible and less bewildering.
Some of this happens through formal committees and policy work. Some of it happens by asking awkwardly specific questions until something improves.
I give workshops, guest lectures, and presentations on neurodiversity, disability, student success, and the many peculiar ways educational systems manage to get in their own way.
I also consult with organizations, help people launch pilot projects, and occasionally provide a second opinion when the first opinion is suspiciously expensive.
When I'm not teaching, studying, or attempting to persuade an institution to make a sensible decision, I have a fairly eclectic collection of other interests.
Old cars, new technology, things with engines, things without engines, and the occasional questionable project that seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea at the time.
I firmly believe that taking your work seriously doesn't require taking yourself terribly seriously.