Critical analysis is not about literature. It is about asking: what is this thing actually saying, beneath the surface? What is it leaving out? Who does it serve, and who does it leave behind? You practice that enough times and it stops being about books. It becomes a way of moving through the world.

That skill, taking a giant tangled concept and reducing it to what is necessary and most meaningful, is the thing I have carried into every room I have ever walked into. A room full of VA government officials. A room full of bedside nurses who had never sat at a desk job before. A room full of engineers who are skeptical of anyone with a business title. I have never walked into a room I could not read. And I have never left one without saying what needed to be said.

Before Cerner, I spent time at Mercy Health Plans learning the shape of healthcare as a business, then at Buy Owner running customer service and editing their print magazine until 2007, when the impending real estate crash closed their doors. When Cerner opened a brand new content development team to modernize documentation for healthcare software, I applied. They needed someone who could translate complicated systems into language a human being could actually use. I used to describe my job as being the F1 key. The help button. It sounds unglamorous. It was one of the most important jobs I have ever had, because it forced me to understand how real people interact with systems that are supposed to help them, and how badly those systems can fail when the humans who built them stop paying attention to the humans who use them.

The role that shaped me most was building the Proprietary Code Standardization Team from scratch. I was asked to take clinical data from dozens of competing EMR systems, Epic, eClinicalWorks, and many others, and standardize them into a single longitudinal patient record. The team grew to 35 people, every one of them a clinician. Nurses. Pharmacists. Lab specialists. People who had spent careers on their feet in direct patient care, now doing some of the most consequential data work in healthcare.

I was not a clinician. I had never worn a stethoscope. And I was their manager. What I understood immediately was that I did not need to know what they knew. I needed to recognize that their knowledge was irreplaceable, and build an environment where they could use it. Hire smart people and help them perform at their highest level. That is the whole job, and I learned it in that room.

From there I moved into platform architecture and then federal consulting, serving as the primary liaison between Cerner's HealtheIntent population health platform and U.S. government health agencies. I led FedRAMP cybersecurity assessments, managed VA and DoD contracts, and was the person in the room when VA leadership had questions about the platform. By the time I left Cerner in 2022, the infrastructure I helped build touched more than 100 million patient records.

I came in as Lead Data Strategist and started building. First, the data engineering business unit from the ground up, including monetizing our data services for the first time. Then I addressed something harder: a data science team that had been left without direction or structure, and wholly lacked trust. I did not arrive with a restructuring plan. I arrived with conversations. One associate had been flagged as high risk. I coached them, sat with them, rebuilt their confidence and their standards. They became one of the strongest contributors on the team. I have had zero turnover among anyone I have managed at FanThreeSixty.

On the technical side, I designed a vendor-agnostic data ingestion framework that more than doubled the ticketing systems we integrated with and cut implementation timelines from months to under two weeks. I led the modernization of the full pipeline from Java to Python, launched a comprehensive data privacy program, and served as the technical lead in sales conversations. I also renegotiated one of our most expensive vendor contracts to half its previous cost, producing a six-figure saving over the three-year term.

The culmination of all these results was a new role as Director of Data Strategy, doubling our annual recurring revenue over four years, and gaining a 40 percent increase in mobile engagement for a key client. This is where I truly love the job. When you know the data helped make someone feel more connected to something they love.

The first is professional. I am a data executive, which sounds like a desk job, and it is. But the best version of it is a performance. I put ENFP on my resume because it tells people something important: I am an extrovert leading a data function, and I believe that is a feature, not a bug. I can read a Python pipeline and I can read a room. I can explain technical architecture to a C-suite in language that makes them feel smart, then turn to their engineering team in terms that earn their trust. Data organizations fail not because the technology breaks but because the humans stop trusting each other. Fixing that gap is the performance I show up for every day.

The second stage is musical. I co-founded The Summer Storms in 2016 and learned dobro guitar as an adult, from scratch, while holding a full-time leadership role. I sing lead vocals, play harmonica, and perform original Americana music with two bandmates. I did not grow up a performer. I chose to become one. That experience changed how I lead. Confidence is not something you have. It is something you build, repetition by repetition, by showing up and doing the work even before you are good enough.

The third stage is philanthropic. I joined the Kansas City Women's Music Network as a board member and eventually became its executive director. I professionalized the board, grew our programming, and produced our annual conference, KCWIMCON. When the pandemic reshaped the landscape, our board asked a question most nonprofits never have the honesty to ask: has our mission been accomplished? We concluded that it had. We dispersed our remaining funds as music grants and wound down with integrity. Choosing completion over continuation is one of the decisions I am most proud of.

Long-term, I am building toward keynote speaking at the intersection of technology and human-centered systems. I believe the next frontier for data is not just what we can measure, but what we choose to value: behavioral patterns, lived experience, and the social factors that shape outcomes but are too often overlooked. That is the kind of problem I want to work on, and it requires someone who can hold technical rigor and human empathy in the same hands.

I have spent nearly two decades building that capacity. I have helped create infrastructure that touched more than 100 million patient records, transformed teams that had lost their direction, helped double a company's revenue, and performed on stage with a dobro, a complex and unique instrument I learned as an adult. I have also lectured at Berklee College of Music on data analytics in the music business, bringing together the technical and creative disciplines that shape how I lead.

I am based in Kansas City. Open to remote and hybrid. If you want someone who can build the platform, earn the trust, and perform at the level this work deserves, let's talk.