About

I am a writer, editor, and scientist with a PhD in quantitative biology.

During my PhD, I studied the evolution of biological complexity. My thesis focused on how multicellular organisms overcome the biophysical costs of having a lot of cells. I used lab and computational experiments to carry out this work. Alongside, I developed an interest in the fundamental question of biology: What is life? This matters for how we understand ourselves as organisms and biology as a science. I'm especially interested in the work of Robert Rosen and a handful of other scientists and phenomenologists including Francisco Varela and Hans Jonas. I have presented on Rosen's anticipatory systems and collaborated on an archive of his work.

I edited the The Tech (the student newspaper) as an undergrad at MIT, and I helped launch The Wire China and wrote infographics for it. I dedicated much of my time in undergrad to The Tech, and built or co-built many things I'm proud of: the culture and staff (grown significantly during my time there, though I can't take full credit), the satire issues, the student government debates and election editorials, even an advice column (if you know, you know), etc. At The Wire China and its sister company WireScreen, I was hired to help build a new kind of hybrid media and intelligence org. How can we take the insights of one journalist from reading company documents, and formalize and replicate them at scale across thousands more companies (WireScreen) — and then turn around to surface and distill those insights to produce more great journalism (The Wire China)? For me, this involved building datasets and tools to get data, and also finding and writing about what's interesting about the data. Alongside working in media orgs, I am interested in how media shapes us and is shaped by us, reading Neil Postman, Daniel Boorstin, Christopher Lasch, and others.

I'm also a local food and agriculture enthusiast. I frequent local farmers markets and I've spent time WWOOFing in the Southeast. I like to read about food, work, the land, and appropriate technology, with Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich, and Jacques Ellul as intellectual influences. My latest personal project is building a recipe app that reinvents recipes by examining their deep structure and building tools on top of it.