I love learning about new stuff and my interests are…​ kind of all over the place, ranging from developmental & organizational psychology to fault-tolerant distributed database technology.

One of my primary areas of study is how kids, especially gifted & talented young folks, figure out who they are as they grow up. I’m particularly interested in how young people find their place in society, including how their civic & political views develop and how they explore and decide on college & career paths. I’m also interested in finding better ways to support kids' social/emotional well-being and creating societal change to better support our kids.

I also enjoy learning about the history and philosophy of educational systems and how we can systemically improve the education system. I believe that schooling as we know is it is fundamentally broken, both in concept and execution, and isn’t really fulfilling it’s supposed purpose of preparing educated citizens who are ready to live successful lives and fully participate in society. I’m a big believer in the self-directed learning movement, and I believe that there’s a lot of untapped potential out there that we’re missing out on by forcing some of our kids to fit into the traditional schooling mold.

Computer science and engineering education is also pretty important to me. Both of these fields are ultimately about learning how to solve problems & implement actual solutions to them by creating new software, mechanisms, or processes. The education system has developed such a warped vision for what effective curricula & teaching in these areas looks like, often reducing these highly complex, creative fields down to paint-by-numbers-style activities and multiple choice tests that completely skip over the transformative critical thinking skills that are core to actually being able to solve problems & make a positive impact on the world. There are plenty of people out there doing this stuff right - I want to help amplify & enhance that and help educators build their skills so they don’t have to lean entirely on canned programs to teach their classes.

I’m also interested in the decline of small-town America and the rural brain drain problem. I come from a small town in a fairly rural area, and I’ve watched from a distance as most of the neighborhood businesses have closed, the schools have lost resources or shut down entirely, and the community as a whole seems to be on an accelerating downhill trajectory. This is a complex problem with many different potential causes - declining school funding and the corresponding drop in quality of education, declining availability of community activities & resources, a lack of investment in these areas, and a tendency for people in these areas to encourage their best and brightest to leave.

Another of my other primary focus areas is complex systems theory, particularly focused around organizational communication and the information systems and automated processes that make that communication work. I enjoy learning more about how different groups and organizations use tools and techniques to build & navigate these systems, and I love taking what I’ve learned and helping community organizations, small businesses, and non-profits figure out their problems in these areas.

Mostly in service of the above, I’m also fascinated by distributed systems and their applications in scaling systems and moving data & processing capabilities around to when & where they’re most needed.

I always enjoy learning more about history - particularly about scientific & technological development, business, education & young people, and American politics.