About
Created out of chaos, sticking around with purpose.
I grew up in a family focused on economic mobility and on breaking cycles of generational trauma. My parents worked hard for that, and with four siblings, I learned young how to pull my weight and look out for the people around me. That sense of being part of something bigger than myself is still how I show up to work.
I'm neurodivergent, and that shapes how I do evaluation more than anything else does. I know what it feels like to be handed information built for someone else's brain, so I'm relentless about making research usable. I'd sit with frontline staff who'd been hired from the communities their programs served, and when I mentioned I was a research director, more than one of them said, "you're too smart for me." I never let that stand. Research should make people feel more capable, not less, and it should never be extractive.
I went back to school at twenty-nine, earning my BA in International Policy and then my Master of Public Administration — with a specialization in monitoring, evaluation, and program design — both from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Coming to it later, and the harder way, is part of why I value clarity over jargon and systems people can actually keep running.
For the past several years I've led community work and built sustainable learning systems inside some of the largest nonprofits in San Francisco, organizations with budgets over twenty million dollars. At the same time, I've partnered with much smaller nonprofits doing critical work with almost no resources. I know both realities, and I design for the one in front of me.
What stays constant is my commitment to the people on the ground. I started Mad Learning Lab in 2025 to serve them directly: program teams and the funders who back them, building measurement practices the community owns and drives. Seven years in, that conviction has only gotten stronger.
I live in San Francisco with my husband Chris and our two cats. I think about the environment a lot. I read constantly, write poems and songs, and improvise whenever I can, on stage and on the dance floor.
My Team of Consultants
A small core, supported by a deep bench.
Mad Learning Lab keeps a small, intentional footprint. When a project calls for additional capacity — specialized methodology, subject-matter depth, or extra analytic hands — I bring in independent consultants from a network of trusted collaborators built over years of working in the field.
It's how I stay nimble and personal while taking on work that needs more than one set of hands.