Education and research direction
Academic background
I entered academic life from the side door. That path still shapes what I expect serious research to do in the real world.
Lincoln Land Community College
Lincoln Land was where college started to make sense. I studied business administration, joined the Honors Program and became a member of Phi Theta Kappa.
That period helped rebuild academic confidence after earlier false starts and gave me a foundation for thinking about organizations, incentives, finance and public problems.
University of Illinois Springfield
At UIS, I completed a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Master of Public Health. Biology gave me a way to think about systems, adaptation, constraints and consequences. Public health made the institutional conditions shaping outcomes impossible to ignore.
I am now a Doctor of Public Administration candidate. My dissertation work focuses on how federal tax policy reinforces financialization across sectors.
Research direction
My research focuses on financialization, public administration, tax policy, governance, institutional behavior and organizational value.
The central question is how financial logic becomes more than a measurement system. When it becomes the dominant internal authority, operational, human, learning, capacity and external value become easier to ignore until their loss appears somewhere else.
I care about academic work that can survive contact with reality. If a theory cannot help explain why people rebuild the same report, why organizations cut staff before removing wasteful processes or why decision authority sits far from operational consequences, it is not useful enough yet.