Thanks for stopping by.

Everything I do now is a result of what came before. If you’re interested, the below is a narration of what primarily links the beginning to the present.

My grandfather’s lessons laid the groundworks: dexterity, ingenuity, and fairness.

A repairman with a wide range of self-taught skills, he taught me to take something apart to the most granular level and inspect every component. Switch things out for better parts; find simpler but more effective ways in which they could interoperate; improve and refinish for a better end product. At every turn, make sure each function is fairly attended to, and all business conducted along the way is resolved to zero.

I then spent 6 years doing broadcast journalism in the United States Air Force.

Across three stations on three different continents, I was put in charge of various units, projects, and personnel. In many of these cases, success was pivotal and the consequences of failure were, while not life-and-death, significant.

Some of these involved many moving parts: live-streaming (the old-fashioned way, meaning lots of tangled cables and delicate camerawork) a special operator’s graduation ceremony for his terminally ill father across the country; coordinating with Space Command to reposition a satellite to capture imagery for a schematic analysis of an air base; ensuring our crisis response protocols in the event of a nuclear or ballistic attack were comprehensible, effective, and compatible with other units’.

Many of these skills became useful during my time as a Marie-Curie PhD Fellow at Radboud University

and an industry consultant at Atos.

The emphasis of my research is on the socio-political dynamics at play in high-tech, collaborative business ecosystems. This includes looking at ways in which companies can leverage their legitimacy and reputation to enlist the partnership of others for joint endeavors; gaining an understanding of the micro-actions company managers can take to gain an advantageous, strategic position ahead of industry-led standardization; and how companies can fairly optimize their business approaches for engagement in emerging markets. More information about our project, including funding sources and research outputs, can be found on our website.

I have also collaborated with Drone Industry Insights: first in 2018 as a researcher tasked with understanding the use of (civilian) UAVs in Sub-Saharan Africa, and now building a spinoff company that I’ll soon be able to detail publicly.

Some things I picked up along the way include:

Functional German.

My B.A. in Mass Communications and Media Studies at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, because I believe media literacy is where we as a society have the most ground to cover this century.

My M.A. in Globalization and Development Studies at Maastricht University, where I researched how South African farmers use drones in their work. I wrote about the results of this research in a chapter of Louise Jupp’s Professional Drone 1, which can be found on Amazon here.

My PADI open water and nitrox SCUBA certifications, and my private pilot’s license.