About

I grew up on a cattle farm in Appalachian Ohio. The work was physical, the community was small, and it was the kind of place where you grow up doing a lot of things with your hands.

I went to Brigham Young University and walked on to the rugby team. The team won a national championship while I was there, which is still one of the proudest things I've been a part of.

After college I went to medical school. The plan was orthopaedic surgery — I liked the directness of it, the mechanical problems with mechanical solutions, and the satisfaction of being able to fix something with your hands. For a long time, that was the path I assumed I'd take.

A research year at Harvard Medical School pulled me sideways. I was working on clinical AI projects and started teaching myself to code to keep up with the engineers around me. ChatGPT launched around the same time, and what had felt like a niche academic interest started to look like a generational shift in medicine. The question stopped being whether AI would change how disease gets treated, and became who was going to do that work.

I turned down a surgical residency and went to Carnegie Mellon University for computer science instead. I wanted to learn AI from the ground up — deeply enough to build new systems for medicine rather than apply off-the-shelf tools to clinical data. Along the way I also published some theoretical physics, mostly out of curiosity: adjacent questions, separate field, but the same kind of pull toward understanding how things actually work.

Now I live in San Francisco, where I'm building Galen Health. We're working on an AI system for cancer research that runs continuously — learning from biomedical literature, drug data, clinical trials, and patient genomics, and slowly building up the kind of understanding that can answer the questions patients and physicians actually have. It's a long-horizon project. Cancer is hard, and the system is far from finished, but it gets a little smarter every day, and that's the part of the work I find most worth doing.