Academics
My academic path was not clean, linear or impressive in the way people usually package these things after the fact. I left high school and earned a GED. I started college more than once before the work finally started to connect to something real.
That matters because I do not treat education as a credential ladder detached from lived pressure. I know what it feels like to enter academic spaces from the side door and still keep going.
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 gave me a more serious foundation for thinking about organizations, incentives, finance and public problems. It also helped me rebuild academic confidence after earlier false starts.
University of Illinois Springfield
At the University of Illinois Springfield, I completed a Bachelor of Science in Biology with a pre-medicine emphasis and a Master of Public Health.
Biology gave me a way to think about systems, adaptation, constraints and consequences. Public health gave me a way to think about institutions, populations, policy and the conditions that shape outcomes before individuals ever make a choice.
I am now a Doctor of Public Administration student at UIS. My dissertation work focuses on how federal tax policy reinforces financialization across sectors.
That research sits close to the rest of my work because I am interested in how financial authority becomes more than accounting. It becomes a decision structure. It shapes what gets measured, protected, delayed, funded, ignored and treated as legitimate.
Research Direction
My academic work focuses on financialization, public administration, tax policy, governance, institutional behavior and organizational value.
The central pattern is simple enough to say plainly. When financial logic becomes the dominant internal authority, other forms of value become easier to ignore until the damage becomes visible somewhere else.
That pattern shows up in public institutions. It shows up in nonprofits. It shows up in private organizations. It shows up anywhere people treat financial evidence as real and operational, human, learning or capacity evidence as secondary.
Why It Matters
I care about academic work that can survive contact with reality. If a theory cannot help explain why people keep rebuilding the same report, why organizations cut staff before removing wasteful processes, or why decision authority sits far away from operational consequences, it is not very useful to me.
My academic work and IVA work are separate, but they share the same pressure point. I am trying to understand how institutions make value visible, how they bury it, and who ends up carrying the cost when the structure gets it wrong.