The story behind the work
Trained to read materials. Driven to read disease.
Trained as a materials engineer, I found my calling turning those same tools on living tissue — treating cells as materials, and their mechanics as a window into disease. That curiosity became a career spanning cancer diagnostics, biomaterials, healthcare technology, and now the regulated manufacturing of an innovative new cancer therapy.
It started with a harder, more personal question than the ones I was trained to ask: what if the same tools used to characterize alloys and composites — stress-strain curves, crystal structure, the mechanics of failure — could be turned on the human body itself?
That question became a career. I started treating biological tissue and living cells as materials in their own right — measuring their stiffness, their viscosity, the way they deform and recover under load — and asking what those physical signatures might reveal about disease. Cancer cells, it turns out, behave differently under stress than healthy ones. That single insight opened a decade-long body of research connecting cell mechanics to the discovery of new diagnostic biomarkers and the design of targeted, localized cancer therapies.
Over the years, that scientific curiosity matured into something broader: a career built at the intersection of science, research, and technology, where the hardest problems rarely respect disciplinary lines. Every difficult question along the way has been met the same way — creatively, rigorously, and without waiting for permission to connect dots other people leave separate.
Most recently, that same instinct has carried me into an unexpected but fitting arena: regulated radiopharmaceutical manufacturing. There, at the intersection of technical program leadership, commissioning and validation, and clean-utilities engineering, I support the infrastructure behind an innovative new cancer therapy for lung cancer — bringing the same scientific fluency that once lived in a cell-mechanics lab to the systems that manufacture the medicines those discoveries make possible.
“I am, in the end, less interested in staying in one lane than in being useful wherever the hardest problem happens to live.”
