Making sense
of what the data are saying.
There’s a messy middle between data, policy, and real life. That’s where I tend to work: where the data are incomplete, the rules are more complicated than they look, and the real question is half data, half politics, and half plumbing.
I’m someone who’s always been drawn to the space between things: between data and people, systems and stories, policy and practice, the official version and what’s actually happening.
Some of that comes from coming up in a Midwestern steel town after the industry had bottomed out and opportunities and people were draining away. Without the words to describe it, I saw early on that systems aren’t abstract. They’re jobs, schools, benefits, housing, family, neighbors, and the quiet work people do to hold things together.
In my formative days, my family was full of people who served others through their work and in their communities. They showed me the value of public service, of caring in practical ways, and of being the kind of person who helps. When I landed in college, I started looking for a direction that could hold that.
In college, I started in environmental science, focused on ecology and chemistry. I enrolled in an urban geography course to fulfill a requirement, and because I’d been really interested in spatial and geographic questions in my environmental courses. In that class, everything came together in an instant. Ecology had taught me to look at systems, relationships, pressure, adaptation, and uneven conditions. Urban geography showed me those same ideas could help explain cities, institutions, and communities.
I’ve taken that and pushed it forward in my work and in how I approach problems. I’m not tied to a particular dogma of any discipline or domain of work. I’m interested in what works for the problem in front of me. Sometimes that means research. Sometimes it means cleaning records, building tools, reading policy, making maps, or helping people get on the same page.
My formal work has moved through elections administration, community development, housing analysis, secondary education and workforce, maternal health, early childhood education, and more. To me, those aren’t separate lanes so much as different ways into the same house: ways to understand systems, support people doing hard work, and contribute something useful.
Administrative Data
→Applied Research
→Maps & Tools
→Project Translation
→I treat data work as fieldwork with spreadsheets: follow the trail, question the categories, check the plumbing, listen to the people who know the system, and don’t trust the output until it survives contact with reality.