Research & Synthesis

Strategic Research & Reports

Celebrating 10 Years of Aspire | VentureWell

Research, impact report & integrated content strategy

For the Aspire program’s tenth anniversary, I led the editorial development of an impact report examining what the investor-readiness program had accomplished. Working closely with VentureWell's data team, I interrogated findings from 177 participating startups and interviewed the leaders and team members behind the program to understand what the numbers revealed — and showcase the medtech and climate tech innovations the program helped bring to market.

The report became the foundation for a six-month content strategy. Through interviews with mentors and founders and research across Aspire's portfolio, I developed stories that brought the data to life through the people, companies, relationships, and innovations behind it — turning a one-time report into a sustained narrative about the program's impact.

Mentor profiles:

• Creative Funding Sources for Early-Stage Entrepreneurs: Interview With Brian Kerns

• The Impact of Angel Investing: Interview with Anne Maghas

Founder profiles:

• Building a Strong Network as a Medtech Company: An Interview With Jason Kang

• Designing for Change: How Kit Switch Is Rethinking Construction

• How These Founders Are Building Sustainability Into Their Medtech Startup

What this demonstrates: research synthesis, data interpretation, qualitative interviews, editorial strategy, impact storytelling, and the ability to turn research into a sustained communications platform.

Strategies to Accelerate and Expand Access to the U.S. Innovation Economy | VentureWell

Policy research, synthesis & strategic writing

For the Federation of American Scientists’ Day One Project, I helped substantively develop and write VentureWell’s policy agenda for strengthening and expanding access to the U.S. innovation economy. Working from a strategic thesis developed by VentureWell President and CEO Phil Weilerstein and Chief Growth and Strategy Officer Mark Marino, I translated their vision and the organization’s considerable expertise into a coherent set of policy recommendations.

The work required synthesizing VentureWell's deep institutional knowledge, federal programs, research, and policy ideas into a concise, persuasive argument organized around inclusion, relevance, and sustainability. My role was not simply to capture the experts' ideas, but to understand them deeply enough to give them structure, clarity, momentum, and a human voice — while meeting the demands of a serious federal policy proposal.

What this demonstrates: policy research, synthesis, strategic writing, executive collaboration, and the ability to turn deep organizational expertise into a compelling argument for change.

Independent Research & Inquiry

The Equality Project

Independent research, systems analysis & interdisciplinary synthesis

The Equality Project grew out of more than a decade working in entrepreneurship and innovation, where I had a front-row seat to scientists, engineers, and founders developing technologies to address problems in healthcare, climate, energy, food, water, and other essential systems. More recently, my work with technology companies adopting generative AI showed me another side of the equation: beyond the hype, these tools are becoming genuinely useful at connecting information, analyzing complex data, and coordinating systems.

I wanted to know what happened when you put those developments together. How close are we, technically, to being able to provide everyone with the fundamentals of a good life — and where could AI materially accelerate progress? I began with energy, healthcare, food and water, and the future of work, drawing on scientific literature, government data, technical research, policy analysis, and existing innovations to understand what is already possible, what remains difficult, and what stands in the way.

Research outlines:

• Clean Energy — We can power a dignified floor for everyone, but not endless waste. Clean energy becomes real only when it becomes infrastructure.

• Food & Water — We have built food and water capacity. The next task is turning capacity into universal, resilient, ecologically durable security.

• Healthcare & Preventable Suffering — Most preventable suffering is not medically mysterious. The scandal is that our systems do not reliably deliver what medicine already knows how to do.

• AI & The Future of Work — The danger is not that humans will have nothing valuable to do. The danger is that we built a world where people must sell labor to survive, then created tools designed to need less of it.

What I found was more hopeful than I expected. Many of the underlying technologies are remarkably mature; the solutions are often fragmented, poorly coordinated, or starved of resources. Generative AI is particularly well suited to some of those coordination and information problems. It can't create the political will or economic structures needed to implement solutions—but the research suggests that technological scarcity is considerably less inevitable than our current systems make it appear.

The project asks what becomes possible if we choose to use the extraordinary tools and knowledge we've already created to improve human lives — and provides a research-based case for how much further we could go, much faster than we tend to assume.

AI as a research tool

I used generative AI extensively throughout the project — not as a substitute for research or judgment, but as a tool for navigating an unusually broad interdisciplinary inquiry. In the process, I learned how to push LLMs toward rigorous, source-grounded research; recognize and prevent hallucinations; use my own expertise to direct and challenge their work; and move iteratively between learning, questioning, verification, and synthesis. The project made me both a more sophisticated researcher with AI and a much more informed judge of what these tools can — and can't — do.

What this demonstrates: independent inquiry, interdisciplinary research, scientific and technical literacy, source evaluation, systems thinking, synthesis across complex fields, AI-assisted research, and the ability to turn an ambitious question into a rigorous research program.

From Research to Insight

Research becomes most useful when it changes how we see a problem. These essays and shorter explorations take questions emerging from my research and follow them outward — connecting technology, policy, economics, culture, and human behavior to develop arguments for a broader audience.

Essays

On Wildfires, Air Quality Alerts — and Climate Change
The Equality Project · Essay
Philadelphia’s pools are closed, trash pickup is suspended, and the air hurts to breathe. We know why this is happening — climate change —and we have many of the tools to stop it from getting worse.

Work Isn't Just Work: Fear of the AI Jobpocalypse
The Equality Project · Essay
The potential AI jobpocalypse matters because work isn't just work: losing your job is disaster for income, housing, healthcare, credit — plus identity and status.

Shorter Explorations

What AI Writing Detectors Get Wrong About Being Human
LinkedIn · Short essay
The biggest problem with AI writing detectors is that they target the wrong problem. We care whether a human or a machine wrote the words because LLMs are making us re-evaluate what it means to be human: story-telling, meaning-making, intentional art-creating creatures.

LLMs Sound Like They’re Thinking. That Doesn’t Mean They Are.
LinkedIn · Short essay
Machine consciousness may be possible. But if a mind existed here — a mind made entirely of language — we would see it in the writing. That's the one place it couldn't hide.

If AI Changes Work, What Is Work Actually For?
LinkedIn · Short essay
What happens if AI radically changes work? We need to rethink scarcity, economic inequality, and what human flourishing might look like.

How Do We “Trust” Chatbots When They Can Be Rewritten Overnight?
LinkedIn · Short essay
Mainstream chatbots are built to resist blatant propaganda — but bad actors are already training their chatbots to deny reality in favor of their chosen ideology.