Experience

Executive Leadership: Member of the Senior Leadership Team, reporting to the CEO and supporting DC CAP's 2050 Moonshot, the organization's goal of 80% college completion for DC students. I lead roughly six people, including the Chief Programs Officer, and I lead the financial planning and analysis function: budgeting, multi-year scenario modeling, and the path-to-stability work the board reasons from. On arrival I ran a full program evaluation and pivoted DC CAP to a regional partnership model, now Pillar 1 of the FY26–28 strategy. Across that partner portfolio, DC CAP sustains 85–90% first-year retention and 75–95% graduation at its established partners.

Innovation + Fundraising: I am the primary architect of the technology and AI strategy that funders are actively backing. I launched DC CAP's Innovation Hub on a $600K KPMG AI Impact Initiative grant, the organization's largest AI investment to date. The Hub houses the AI Governance Framework and the Career Pathway Intelligence Platform (launching October 2026). I have been instrumental in more than $50M in philanthropic commitments since joining, including MacKenzie Scott and Yield Giving.

Organizational Health: I lead five units, Student Success, University Partnerships, GEAR UP, Innovation, and Data & Technology, and I built the analytics, evaluation, and storytelling infrastructure that anchors the annual fundraising model. I authored four Standards of Practice, covering disbursement, renewal, the programmatic FAQ, and staff onboarding, so the institutional knowledge no longer lives in any one person's head. Across my time at Common App and DC CAP, three direct reports have earned promotions, one of them twice.

Change Management: I lead DC CAP's digital transformation. I designed the AI Governance Framework, which now governs how staff use AI day to day, and I ran the 60-day pilot that introduced it to nine staff across three units from April to June 2026. I designed the Salesforce Operational Architecture that runs the scholar lifecycle: a renewal cycle for current scholars, a tighter application and award cycle, and a communications journey across counselors, partner universities, and scholars. The application process now runs at one person and 3–5 hours a week, down from roughly ten people at 20-plus hours; coach administrative load fell from about 60% of a coach's time to under 10%. Two production agentic systems run in-house on a shared five-agent pattern, with audit trails on every output.

Founding Team Member: Second member of the founding research function at Common App, the largest college application dataset in the United States. Defined the data environment, technical stack, research agenda, and data sharing policies.

External Relations: Primary spokesperson for data insights, representing the organization to national media (NYT, Bloomberg) and the Board of Directors.

Strategic Partnerships: Negotiated and managed research collaborations and data-sharing protocols with leading universities. Resulting work was profiled at NBER, Brookings, the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP), and the EdWorkingPapers Series at Brown University's Annenberg Institute. Led randomized control trials on direct admissions and text-message information campaigns.

UVA–Louisiana Department of Education Partnership: Policy and accountability systems research with the Louisiana Department of Education during a multi-year statewide policy rollout (2017–2020). Worked directly with state policymakers and district leaders on accountability design.

Published Research: The partnership produced peer-reviewed publications on statewide policy implementation and program quality. A longitudinal study of early-childhood program quality improvement under Louisiana's quality rating system appeared in AERA Open and ECRQ, alongside additional accountability-policy research and a policy brief.

Managed editorial operations, review pipelines, and production scheduling for one of the nation's oldest education policy journals while completing MPP coursework.

Led large achievement gains in elementary school turnaround environment (95th percentile value-added scores). Selected as regional winner of the Excellence in Teaching Award.