About

Most of what's interesting about me doesn't fit on a resume. Most of what we'd want to know about the ancient Egyptians isn't in the artifacts they left behind; it's in the living stories that didn't survive. Below is a bit of mine.

I grew up in Jennings, Missouri, a suburb just across the St. Louis city border that ranks among the most violent places in AmericaViolent crime more than four times the national average. 1-in-48 odds of being a victim in a typical year. More than 90% of the school district’s students qualify for free or reduced-price meals; the district went more than a decade without full accreditation.sources: NeighborhoodScout · EdWeek · NPR. I only ever had one parent: my mother. She left her home and family in Kansas City to shield me from the harshness of the environment there, an environment that had already sent my older brother to prison at sixteen. Ironically, she and I landed in another ghetto, three hundred miles away, when I was three years old.

What propels me, what has always propelled me, is a love of learning and teaching. At thirteen I discovered Duolingo and went on to teach myself several languages, devouring whatever free materials the internet would give me, including Grammatica della lingua italiana, an Italian-language grammar from 1844. My high school couldn't afford to offer calculus since there were not enough students proficient enough in math to justify the class. I never touched it until the spring of my first year at Harvard, when my old math teacher lent me a textbook and I taught it to myself. I spent a decade certain I'd be an architect before language, human first and then machine, pulled me into AI. Through all of it, my saving grace was the internet: knowledge unbounded by space and time, the light that could reach me in the dark.

Today, I think that light is AI. The mission underpinning everything I do is twofold. On one hand, I want to increase the knowledge accessible to all people: the fruits of hard science, formalizing equations for gravity, encoding information into circuits. On the other, I want to distribute that knowledge to the far reaches of civilization so that material circumstances do not inhibit our growth as a species. These two goals form a cycle, and there's reason to believe that cycle has been essential to our survival from the very beginning. Evidence suggests that Homo sapiens outlasted Neanderthals not through smarter tools or bigger brains but through stronger networks of cultural exchange and a higher capacity for cumulative culture, the ability to move knowledge between groups when it mattered most. I understand the second goal as the fruit of practical action and leadership, because the distance between "wasn't supposed to make it" and "did" is almost always someone showing up.

Somewhere around age four or five, I told my mother I would go to Harvard. I don't know where it came from; I couldn't have told you what Harvard was. It sits in my memory as something visceral, less a plan than a premonition. What turned it real was people showing up: a mother who moved three hundred miles, a math teacher who kept lending books years after I left her classroom, mentors who set up field trips to visit colleges, Harvard among them, so that the road I'd named in the dark became one I could actually see. People showing up is how leaders get made, and showing up is the discipline I practice back. At Harvard I directed Franklin After School Enrichment and re-established its companion mentorship program Franklin Teen under PBHA, the college's public service body. On breaks I went back to my old high school and middle school. After returning to St. Louis, I organize career-exposure field trips that bring students from my old high school into my office, the same kind of trip that once carried me there.

That's why I work in AI. The internet was a light that reached one kid in Jennings; AI is a brighter light, a teacher no budget line can cancel, a mentor that can show up anywhere. My work today is making it land inside real institutions. My work ahead is making sure it lands everywhere. If any of this is your mission too, widening what our species knows or carrying that light to the people it hasn't reached, I'd love to hear from you.