A chemical engineer who kept finding his way into strategy rooms.

I grew up in Lake Forest, a small town north of Chicago, with a few years in Singapore in the middle of it that gave me an early, useful habit of noticing how differently people build the same kind of life depending on where they start. I was born on Opening Day, which my family has always treated as a sign that the Cubs were non-negotiable. I still haven't found a way to argue with that logic. In high school I was an Eagle Scout and, somewhat improbably, sat on my church's session and finance committee managing a multi-million dollar endowment through a budget crisis at seventeen. I didn't know it then, but that was the first time I found operations and strategy more interesting than almost anything else on offer.

I studied Chemical Engineering at Northwestern, with minors in Computer Science and Economics because I never wanted to fully choose between the technical and the commercial. I spent two years in the Richards Soft Matter and Colloid Laboratory building a conductive rheometer to study the transport properties of nanoparticle suspensions, work that was eventually published in PNAS. I also ran TEDxNorthwesternU as director, which turned out to be a useful crash course in the unglamorous parts of building something: fundraising, logistics, and getting a room full of skeptical people to agree on a plan.

Deloitte, 2020 to 2024

After Northwestern I joined Deloitte's Cell and Gene Therapy practice, first as a summer scholar, then full time. Four years there took me through healthcare strategy, digital health platform design, and the operational side of cell and gene therapy, the kind of work where a client's roadmap on a slide has to eventually become a real organization with real people in it. I built the strategy and operating model that helped a client secure a $71B federal care delivery contract, wrote the five-year commercial launch plan for a mid-sized CAR-T pipeline, and worked alongside the financial modeling and board materials that helped grow a private equity-backed health-technology platform from $238M to $1B in revenue. Along the way I also helped grow Deloitte's own Cell and Gene Therapy practice from $100M to $250M, and started an internal working group on synthetic biology and food technology that ended up pulling in members from fifteen different organizations. The Work page has the fuller version of all of this.

MIT, 2024 to 2026

By my third year at Deloitte I knew I wanted to go back to something more technical, but I didn't want to give up the strategy and operating instincts I had built. MIT's Leaders for Global Operations program, which pairs an MBA from Sloan with a Master's in Chemical Engineering, was built for exactly that problem. Two years, one cohort of engineers-turned-operators, and a six-month embedded internship instead of a summer project. I also somehow ended up president of the Sloan Golf Club, which mostly meant I got to keep organizing things I liked doing anyway, this time with a scorecard involved.

Amgen, 2025

The LGO internship is where the ChemE half of the degree earned its keep. I spent six months at Amgen's Advanced Modeling and Simulation group building hybrid mechanistic and machine learning models to redesign how the company runs process characterization studies, the experiments that prove a biologics manufacturing process is robust before it goes to scale. The short version: the models matched standard accuracy using 54 percent fewer experiments, which became my thesis and a real business case for Amgen. The long version is on the Work page, with the methodology, the findings, and a link to the thesis itself.

Away from work

Most of my downtime lives outdoors. I ski, I sail when I can talk my way onto a boat, and I try to get to a national park at least once a year, usually with a camera I take a little too seriously for how mediocre most of the resulting photos are. Fly fishing scratches a similar itch: something about a sport that rewards patience over urgency appeals to someone who spends most of the week in the opposite mode. Closer to home I bake bread most weekends, I'm slowly learning more about watches than is strictly useful, and I play enough chess to have opinions about openings I can't actually explain well. I read more than I watch, but I do both, and I'll always make time for a good golf outing, ideally one I had a hand in organizing.

Now, and what's next

I'm based in the Chicago area for the summer, moving to Cambridge, MA in August 2026. I'm spending most of my attention on AI-enabled biomanufacturing, manufacturing software, and synthetic biology, and thinking a lot about what it takes to build the tools that let deep technical work move faster without cutting corners. If that's a conversation you're having too, I'd like to hear about it.