I grew up in Newport, Kentucky, where the Ohio River was part of how the city worked. Bridges carried people across state lines, levees held back floodwater, and barge traffic moved through as a matter of course. As a staffer in the United States Senate, I helped draft legislative language for the Water Resources Development Act and worked with engineers and policy staff reviewing project proposals. That gave me a practical understanding of how river systems, flood control, and navigation policy shape regional life.

For me, healthcare started as a question of access. It affected whether people got seen in time, whether treatment was delayed, and how much stress a family had to carry on top of everything else. In appropriations work, I have supported public interest nonprofits seeking funding requests before the Defense and Labor-HHS subcommittees, and I have also seen health policy show up through constituent concerns and oversight questions. It is one of the clearest ways government touches daily life.

Environmental policy is one of the places where the gap between the problem and the response is hardest to ignore. As a Senate staffer, I worked on oversight tied to hazardous chemicals, energy governance, and federal environmental law, which meant reading technical records, regulatory filings, and witness materials ahead of hearings. Spending that much time in the details changes the way you see the issue. Government has the tools to do more than it often does, and the cost of delay is already visible.

I grew up below the poverty line and went to a career and technical education high school in Northern Kentucky. In that context, economic development meant something simple. Could people get trained for work that paid enough to live on, and would there still be a future in the place they called home. I later worked on federal economic development policy and studied transition in Appalachian coal communities, which deepened my interest in regional investment and what public policy owes places that have absorbed decades of disinvestment.

Some of my earliest ideas about agriculture came from school meals, SNAP, and growing up in Kentucky close to the people who produced our food. Farm visits made the connection plain. Food did not just appear. It came from labor, land, weather, markets, and policy. Later I worked on agricultural policy and congressional briefings tied to farm programs and rural development. I think about agriculture as central to food security, conservation, trade, and the economic life of rural communities because that is how it has always appeared to me.

You can learn a lot about a government by reading what it funds and what it lets shrink. I have spent time deep in appropriations language, budget justifications, and committee guidance, tracing how spending decisions are made and where priorities harden into law. What stands out to me is how often public goods are treated as negotiable even when they are the things taxpayers rely on most. Budgeting decides whether services, infrastructure, and long-term investment survive beyond the talking points.

Before I ever studied labor markets, I worked shifts. My first job was unloading trucks as a clerk at Kroger, and later I worked in bars and other service jobs while I was in school. Those jobs made wages, schedules, and job security feel immediate in a way no dataset ever could. Now I study hiring patterns and credential requirements at Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce, and I carry both perspectives with me when I think about work, mobility, and economic pressure.

Artificial intelligence already reaches into hiring, education, and the way institutions sort and evaluate people. My research looks at how these systems affect job requirements and economic opportunity, and earlier projects examined language models and digital content systems more directly. What interests me here is not novelty for its own sake. It is the speed with which these tools are being folded into ordinary life, often before workers, students, and public institutions have much say in the terms.

I started in criminal justice by reading case files tied to potential wrongful convictions. That kind of work trains your attention fast because a small inconsistency can matter, and sloppy thinking can do real damage. Later I worked in a setting focused on police oversight and institutional accountability, where the same habits carried over in a different form. Those experiences made me more serious about evidence, about review, and about the obligations institutions take on when they exercise power over people's lives.

Disaster recovery is one of the clearest tests of whether government can function when the pressure is on. I saw that during federal coordination tied to the Baltimore bridge collapse and through work on watershed recovery, wildfire response, and disaster assistance programs. In those moments, preparation shows up quickly, and so does its absence. Recovery depends on whether agencies can move information, money, and decisions fast enough to meet the scale of the damage in front of them.

Politics became part of my life through LGBTQ advocacy in Kentucky. I helped organize and support Gay Straight Alliances in local schools, and in 2019 I was named Northern Kentucky Pride Youth Activist of the Year. What mattered most in that work was creating room for students who did not feel safe, heard, or included in the places around them. That experience shaped the way I think about civic participation from the start, as a question of who gets welcomed into public life and who gets pushed to its edges.