I've spent most of my career sitting at the intersection of technical depth and public service — after the Air Force denied my commission, I found my way to the mission anyway, first through Space Force and Air Force as a civilian, and now in industry at SAIC's Tech Futures group, where I work alongside PhD-level researchers on the hardest AI, Data, and Quantum problems in defense. The through-line has always been the same: I want to work on things that matter for people beyond the room I'm sitting in.
Right now, the project pulling at me most is closing what I've started calling the Quantum chokepoint. Quantum research inside Tech Futures is generating knowledge that never reaches the solution architects and delivery teams who need it — the same pattern I watched play out with AI, one level up the tower. I have no authority to mandate a fix and no budget to deploy one. What I have is a diagnosed problem, a coalition built through the quality of the work itself, and a plan: a Quantum persona inside our internal AI assistant, built on a knowledge base that translates raw research into something a delivery team can actually use.
That work hasn't stayed contained to Quantum. This year also brought a growth optimization model I've been asked to helm by an EVP outside my reporting line, and a conversation about a bioscience venture that said plainly what had been assembling in pieces: I'm not being handed a defined workstream anymore. I'm being asked to find my own market segment and become the person who owns it.
That's the bet I'm making: that the methodology transfers. Same rigor, different frontier. The mission stays the same.
Four essays and the first Resoluta Press edition are out this year.
There is a version of my story that exists in news articles and interviews and now in my father's words, and I have enormous love for all of it. But I want my own voice. One that isn't shaped by a correspondent's framing or filtered through grief that isn't mine to carry alone. Writing is how I get there.
My debut essay published May 15. The through-line across all of them: from the body to the mind to the tools we build to hold both.
I'm also deep into limb salvage research with more intention than before. The literature is thin, especially for young women. The longitudinal dataset I'm building through my own daily tracking is already generating signal. The PhD formalizes what that instrument is producing. The reading and the data are running in parallel now.
For most of the past decade, I operated like I had something to prove. That I'd earned my second chance. That the rehabilitation, the surgeries, the deferred scholarship, the years of relearning how to walk — that all of it meant something because of what I built afterward. I don't regret any of it. But I pushed hard enough, long enough, that I sometimes lost track of what I was actually building toward.
I'm putting down something harder, too: the doubt that keeps my head down and around instead of up and forward, the fear that one imperfect answer could undo everything the people backing me have already invested. That fear has it backward. Nobody scaffolds a growth path for someone they expect to be perfect. They scaffold it for someone they've already watched recover from harder things than a wrong answer.
The routines are what's holding it all together: work, the gym, Pilates, Versaclimber, video games after dinner, and my Belgian Malinois keeping me honest about the schedule. She doesn't negotiate. Neither do I, anymore. Two hundred days of daily tracking has produced a recovery arc — the clearest one the data has surfaced yet, and it came directly after the hardest stretch.