I build things, lead people, and occasionally race boats.

I lead educational technology, build things that didn’t exist before, and race outrigger canoes on the side.

I’m the Assistant Vice President of Educational Technology Services at Chapman University, where I lead a team of 11 at the intersection of people, technology, and higher education’s rapidly changing business. I co-chair our AI Task Force and spend a fair amount of time figuring out what happens when a technology moves from interesting to institutional.

Right now that mostly means AI. I’ve been experimenting with generative AI since 2019, long before ChatGPT made it impossible for higher education to ignore. Today I’m working on AI literacy, adoption, governance, and accessibility, and on the harder question underneath all of them: how do we change an institution without losing the people we’re changing it for?

My career has never followed a particularly straight line.

I’m a historian by training, but I ended up building technology. I started on the internet in 1995, when making a website meant writing HTML by hand. I moved through digital scholarship, podcasting, learning technology, and educational technology, usually arriving a little before the job title existed. I joined Chapman University in 2010 and worked my way up through several roles there before stepping into my current position in 2021.

I’ve taught history, digital humanities, disability history, and environmental history. I’ve built platforms. I’ve led large-scale technology projects. I’ve trained faculty through a pandemic. I’ve spent years translating between faculty, technologists, administrators, and vendors who don’t always speak the same language.

The pattern is pretty consistent: I find something interesting, I try it, I build something, I figure out what actually works, and then I help other people use it.

I also race boats.

In 2024, I won World Championship gold in both the 250m and 500m VL3 races at the World Va’a Championships. I won’t pretend the medals aren’t fun.

But adaptive sport has become much more than a hobby for me. I’m a member of Team USA Paradragons and a Paradragon Advocate for the US Dragon Boat Federation, working on the less glamorous parts of adaptive sport: classification, equipment, accessibility, competition rules, and the logistics that determine who actually gets to participate.

I race as a leg amputee. I’ve had a prosthetic leg for more than two decades, after a bone cancer diagnosis at twelve.

I’ve grown bored with the overcoming-disability version of this story. What interests me now is what happens after overcoming: who gets access, who gets left out, what a system assumes about the people using it, and what self-advocacy costs when you weren’t the person it was designed for.

That question shows up in almost everything I do.

• It shows up in adaptive sport.
• It shows up in accessibility work.
• It shows up in how I think about AI.
• And it shows up in how I lead.

I build for the person who isn’t in the room.

Being a beginner has taught me something I didn’t expect: the best way to understand a system is sometimes to be the person who doesn’t know how it works yet.

Every year, on purpose, I become a beginner at something new. Welding. Open-water snorkeling. Geolocation. Rock climbing. Outrigger canoeing. A library science degree, rather late in a career that already had a doctorate in history.

Being new at something makes you notice things experts stop seeing: the instruction that only makes sense if you already knew the answer, the piece of equipment that was clearly never tested on anyone like you, and how often people would rather struggle silently than ask, because asking marks you as the one who doesn’t already know.

I’ve carried that awareness into my professional work. When I build a system, design a classroom, introduce a new technology, or lead a change effort, I think about the person standing at the edge of it, wondering how this is supposed to work. That’s who I build for.

I believe good technology is mostly about people.

Technology is the visible part of my work. The interesting part is usually everything around it: how do you move 1,200 faculty through a massive change without treating them as one faculty? Accessibility, too often, is the thing we apologize for at the end instead of building in from the start. And a project team eventually goes home. The real test is whether anyone still uses what they built once it does. That’s the part of the job I actually care about.

There is, of course, a longer story.

I started writing on the internet as pilgrimgirl more than twenty years ago, when I was studying journey narratives and felt like I was on one, and never really stopped.

I’ve written about history, disability, faith, technology, and the odd experience of becoming a person while everyone around you assumes you’re already done.

Along the way, I co-founded The Exponent, an independent online publication and community for Mormon feminists that has been publishing for more than two decades. My Radical Mormon Feminist Manifesto became one of the pieces I am best known for in that community, later described as “prophetic” in High Country News.

It’s a specific chapter (Mormonism, feminism, a blog), but it’s really the first time I learned what it takes to change an institution from the inside: patience, evidence, and a willingness to be unpopular for a while. That’s still, more or less, the job.