To promote human flourishing is the first and highest purpose of the urban environment. Technology can help -- so long as it remains a means to that end. In-house technical capacity at public agencies (and large-scale civic-sector organizations generally) has been in free-fall for a generation; simple, robust, composable tools that departments own outright can go a long way toward rebuilding organizations' sovereignty over their digital ecosystems. Stride, my consulting practice, exists to aid in this restoration: I build geospatial tools, data pipelines, and lightweight web applications for public-sector and civic-tech clients, designed to be owned and used by those grappling with concrete operational challenges day-to-day.
My day job is of a piece with this work: as a Synthetic Population Engineer at Epistemix, I maintain and improve a spatially realistic, individual-level model of the U.S. and U.K. populations, along with the tooling and infrastructure that support agent-based simulation against it. I came to engineering by way of public service: before moving to London, I spent nearly three years at the New York City Housing Authority, much of it in direct contact with the field staff who actually use what gets built; before that, I earned a Master of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, where I studied the determinants of eviction across the State of Michigan; and before any of that, I worked as a news translator for The Nikkei, Japan's premier economic daily.
When carrying a text from one language to another, two things are required: a thorough understanding of the original's meaning and context, and a nimble facility with the target language's conventions and constraints. When scaling and adapting a policy innovation -- or a piece of software -- from one setting to another, the process is identical; only the medium is different. Translation, broadly defined, is still most of what I do: turning messy facts and data into a strong, compelling narrative that will drive policymakers to action, and helping analysts, engineers, and operations staff communicate in a common language.
I also write occasionally, on geospatial engineering and other topics that strike me; recent essays, projects, and publications are located under work . Reach out via the contact page to talk urban informatics, data-driven governance, and/or the beautiful and complex interdependencies of urban life.