Research at the threshold of what leadership makes possible.

This research is personal before it is academic. My own NICU experience in 2009–2010 — navigating the most disorienting threshold I had ever crossed — became the ground from which my advocacy work and scholarship grew. It is not research about an experience I observed. It is research into an experience I lived, and from which I have never stopped leading.

My dissertation proposal is approved. Research begins summer 2026. Completion expected December 2026.

Connected to Speaking

My research on Patient Leadership and NICU Parent Leadership is available as a presentation for healthcare systems, neonatal networks, and academic conferences.

My scholarship is grounded in the servant-leadership tradition — specifically the strand that runs from Greenleaf's founding inversion through the contemporary empirical and theoretical work of Ferch, Spears, Song, Tran, Eva, and Liden. My concentration at Gonzaga University, one of the field's foremost scholarly communities, has immersed me in both the historical manuscripts and the leading edge of current research.

My work also draws on Otto Scharmer's Theory U — the practice of leading from an emerging future rather than the patterns of the past — alongside Robert Kegan's subject-object theory and adult development stages, and Jennifer Garvey Berger's work on adult development and complexity in leadership. The systems thinking traditions of Margaret Wheatley and Peter Senge ground my understanding of how organizations learn and evolve. And Brené Brown's scholarship on vulnerability, courage, and wholehearted leadership runs throughout — connecting the interior condition of the leader to the relational fabric of the cultures I help build.

Academic Platforms

My teaching spans two institutions and more than two decades — from foundational leadership courses at Golden Gate University to graduate seminars at Gonzaga University's School of Leadership Studies.

This is not a record of completion. It is a record of becoming. The work collected here spans doctoral scholarship, reflective practice, and applied leadership — organized across five thematic domains that together chart a single inquiry: what becomes possible when those most affected by the systems they inhabit are recognized not as stakeholders, but as architects of transformation?

Rooted in the Jesuit tradition of cura personalis — care for the whole person — each entry links to a reflection, artifact, or evidence of applied practice.

At the heart of my graduate journey in Organizational Leadership lies a guiding principle that transcends theory or technique: cura personalis — care for the whole person. Across each course, I was called to integrate mind and heart, action and reflection, systems and soul. What follows is not just a list of academic accomplishments, but a narrative of becoming — an unfolding rooted in the belief that true leadership begins with compassionate attention to the whole person, including oneself.