About
Systems engineer. I work in the finance and operations machinery of rural critical access hospitals. Currently Financial Analyst at Northeast Montana Health Services on the Fort Peck Reservation, and in the PhD program at Montana State under Dr. Bernadette McCrory. Based in Salt Lake City.
Background
I grew up in eastern Kentucky. Taught myself web development around 2010, PHP/LAMP era, when you could take a project, grind sixty hours to learn the stack, and do the next one in twenty. Built for real clients in Kentucky, then a streaming platform in Boulder through its IPO, then a decade in the cannabis industry building platform architecture, first for one of Colorado's largest independent retailers, then for a publicly traded MSO.
The cannabis work ended. The industry runs on institutional mysticism, an active refusal to measure things, because measurement threatens people whose authority rests on subjective expertise. Engineering eventually makes that intolerable.
Community college one class at a time while working, then full-time at Flathead Valley Community College during the pandemic, then Montana State. BS in Industrial & Management Systems Engineering in December 2025, at 38. Tau Beta Pi, FE exam. Now in the PhD program, dissertation pointed at whether independent rural hospitals can achieve shared-services scale without being absorbed into regional systems. Methods: operations research and statistical modeling, which are where most of my research time actually goes.
Before landing at NEMHS there was a serious path at a precision manufacturer in Salt Lake City that works in aluminum, carbon composites, and aerospace applications, with a sister brand that is the dominant name in competitive archery equipment. I grew up in and around that industry and competed nationally, though the NEMHS role aligned more closely with where the work is actually going.
Other
Serious golfer working toward a single-digit handicap. Long-distance runner. Home cook. Twenty-eight years on guitar, now learning piano. Burgundy and Barolo. Converting to Catholicism and reading seriously in the tradition. My wife is a physician starting psychiatry residency at the University of Utah; we have an infant daughter.