How Did You Get Your Start?

Growing up, I always enjoyed building things, so I chose to be an engineering major at UVA. I attended a lot of the E-school major exploration nights and found biomedical engineering fascinating.

It was building in a way that had tangible impacts on people, which drew me to it.

Originally I thought I’d work in medical devices, but after taking some computer science classes, I became more interested in coding.

I ended up majoring in biomedical engineering and minoring in computer science. That combo led me to my first job at MITRE.

MITRE is a not-for-profit that runs federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) for the U.S. government. They act as an objective, independent partner, helping tackle complex national challenges by bringing together expertise from across government, industry, and academia. A lot of the work focuses on forward-looking, cutting-edge systems and engineering projects that support critical missions.

I applied and was accepted for an internship as a health IT software developer between my 3rd and 4th year.

I had a great experience, got a return offer, and decided to go back full time.

That led me to spend the first 5 years of my professional career at MITRE, where I worked on a number of projects for agencies including the CDC and FDA, mainly building open source data-driven healthcare technology.

Earlier this year, I moved on to join a startup, Pivotal Health AI, which is also using data to solve problems in the healthcare space. But I look back fondly to my experiences at MITRE, and credit MITRE with jumpstarting my passion towards working on small teams to make big differences in healthcare technology.