I've spent most of my career sitting at the intersection of technical depth and public service — medically disqualified from commissioning into the Air Force, I found my way to the mission anyway, first through the Space Force and Air Force as a civilian, and now in industry at SAIC. 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 the work I'm doing for the Department of Transportation. There is an enormous amount of publicly available transit data in this country — and almost none of it is being used to actually serve the communities that depend on transit most. Agencies are run off of capitalist metrics rather than community impact metrics. Nobody has built the dashboard that shows decision-makers the full picture of how their systems are performing for the people who need them.
That's the bet I'm making: that the work I'm doing now becomes a model I can replicate across other sectors. Same methodology, different community, different data. The mission stays the same.
Three essays have been living in my head for months. I want to actually write them this year — not just hold them as ideas.
There's a particular urgency to this right now. We just passed the ten-year anniversary of what I call my I'm alive day. My father is publishing his memoir on June 4th — my mother's birthday. 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.
Most of what I'm learning right now isn't from a course or a paper — it's coming from the work itself. The DoT project is teaching me how to make data legible to people whose job is governance, not analysis. That translation layer — between what the data says and what a decision-maker can act on — is something I'm getting sharper at every week.
I'm also quietly beginning to read into limb salvage research with more intention. The literature is thin, especially for young women. I don't have a formal PhD proposal yet but I'm building the foundations of one — understanding where the gaps are, whose questions the existing research was built to answer, and what an AI-informed framework might actually look like for patients who look like me.
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.
This spring feels different. My brother graudated college and commissioned into the Space Force. My sister is in her first year of college in Spain. My youngest sister is a junior in high school. When I moved back to be closer to family after California, I made a promise to my dad — I'd stay until everyone got to college. That promise is almost kept. I'm planning to move back to Florida, to my partner, and to finally build a life that is arranged around what I want.
The routines are what's holding it all together: work, the gym, the Pilates studio, meal prep, video games after dinner, and my Belgian Malinois keeping me honest about the schedule. She doesn't negotiate. Neither do I, anymore.