When I first joined ARLIS, I felt equal parts excitement and humility. Excitement, because after conducting prevention- and policy-focused research where outcomes often required long timelines to materialize, I was eager to contribute to mission-driven work with near-term impact. Humility, because the opportunity also brought with it a wave of imposter syndrome. My new colleagues were impressive and had deep expertise in their respective fields as engineers, physicists, linguists, data scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists and even more “-ists.” When welcomed to ARLIS and asked about my background, I heard myself saying “public health . . . and before that, architecture,” and watching eyebrows raise as they probably wondered what I had to contribute to ARLIS’s Intelligence and Security mission. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what part, or parts, of my background had resonated most with the hiring committee. Over time, I realized it was the diversity of my experiences, collectively, that made me a strong candidate.
My career has followed an unconventional path, shaped by curiosity, opportunity, and a willingness to pivot across disciplines. It began in architecture, where I explored how physical space influences human emotion and behavior. Graduate research focused on historical approaches, studying how ancient civilizations conceived beauty and created standards and specifications for various building types and components. Architecture instilled in me systems thinking, a perspective that allows me to anticipate unintended consequences and identify leverage points where small changes can produce outsized effects. It also sharpened my attention to detail and developed my ability to communicate complex ideas, both verbally and graphically, a skill that has been invaluable across every subsequent discipline.
The 2008 financial crisis had a tremendous impact on the field of architecture. This, coupled with a personal interest in health and the sciences, prompted me to pivot toward exercise science, initially with pre-medical aspirations. Here, I studied the biomechanics and physiology of movement, honing analytical rigor and beginning to bridge my work to human performance, experience that later proved directly relevant to health- and performance-focused projects in the Human Performance and Readiness Augmentation mission area at ARLIS.
From exercise science, my path led to prevention research and public health, where I focused on population-level interventions. This work also requires systems thinking, but at a broader, societal scale; examining how social, environmental, and policy factors interact to shape health outcomes. Additionally, public health emphasizes equity, prevention, and long-term population impact, and has provided me with a unique lens for examining emerging challenges in technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomy. Understanding how these issues intersect with societal structures, individual well-being, ethical considerations, and policy has enabled me to contribute to complex research questions at ARLIS.
Building on this foundation, my subsequent work in public health as a data scientist has allowed me to operationalize these insights, turning complex quantitative and qualitative datasets into actionable knowledge. This phase of my career integrates analytical rigor, systems perspective, and design-thinking skills, enabling me to identify patterns, extract insights, and translate findings into evidence-based recommendations that inform decision-making. This skill set, spanning systems thinking, human factors and design considerations, human physiology and performance, population-level evaluation and policy analysis, and AI ethics and decision-making research, directly supports ARLIS’s mission-driven work. By bringing these perspectives together, I can bridge technical and human considerations, frame complex sociotechnical problems, and contribute to solutions that are both operationally relevant and ethically grounded.
While I may not have the most technical background at ARLIS, I leverage my interdisciplinary toolkit to bring creativity, rigor, and holistic insight in my work. Indeed, on a recent project exploring how emerging technologies might impact operational medicine, an interdisciplinary mindset helped anticipate downstream design problems and operational risks before they became problems. Thus, I have come to appreciate that meaningful contributions to complex problems don’t require following a traditional technical career path. In fact, approaching challenges from multiple perspectives can be a real advantage. This unconventional pathway has not only shaped my approach to research but also underscores the potential value of diverse experiences.
At ARLIS, this diversity isn’t just valued, it’s essential. Solving today’s sociotechnical challenges, those sitting at the intersection of people, technology, and our nation’s defense and strategic advantage, requires insights that no single discipline can provide. Many of my colleagues also bring unconventional career journeys that make their contributions rich. That’s part of what makes ARLIS a special place. We know the toughest problems need creativity as much as technical expertise, and we thrive on perspectives born of diverse, novel backgrounds. If your career path has zigged and zagged, if the skills you’ve cultivated fit into not a single box, but several, and if you have an interest in supporting national security, ARLIS might be the right place for you.