From the Boardroom to the Field

I spent the first two decades of my career helping brands understand people by leading research and strategy for campaigns across health, wellness, and social impact. I desired to be an agent of change but kept running into the limits of what you can do from inside the private sector. At a certain point, it wasn’t enough to optimize messaging. I wanted to ask harder questions about power, access, and who actually gets to heal.

That’s what brought me back to graduate school and into medical anthropology. My current work focuses on psychedelics and substance use disorder, with a simple premise: neurobiology matters, but context is the medicine. In my thesis, I’m studying how people with SUD use communal meaning‑making to turn a psychedelic experience into real, lasting change. I’m especially interested in what that looks like outside idealized clinical trials - in messy, real and complicated lives.