“Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.”
— Aristotle
My mother shared this maxim with me when I graduated high school, penned in her eloquent cursive. My father worked countless blue-collar jobs before enrolling in a community college to one day become a physician. Together, they inspired me to be purpose-driven and to embrace nonlinearity in my life path.
At the University of Notre Dame, I applied to join the Program of Liberal Studies, an intensive “Great Books” program. We began with the Greeks and read chronologically the seminal texts in philosophy, ethics, theology, mathematics, biology, economics, political theory, psychology, and literature. I got C’s and D’s on my first papers. My professors saw through the decadent language I had been rewarded for in high school and pressed me relentlessly on critical thinking and logical argumentation. Gradually, and with great effort, I learned how to read. I learned how to write. I learned how to think.
Armed with this education, I turned my attention the challenge of poverty, a topic I scarcely understood. Having served as the captain and president of the Notre Dame Boxing Team, which supports social work and education in Bangladesh, I developed a penchant for political economy and development. Visiting Bangladesh over several years, I wrote papers on the country’s constitution and educational system, started a new service learning program at Notre Dame, produced a documentary film called Strong Bodies Fight, and conducted field research on the garments industry following the Rana Plaza factory collapse that killed 1,134 people (and traumatized thousands more).
People in international development invariably encounter a troubling truth: many anti-poverty programs do more harm than good. Some leave the sector for this reason. Others forge ahead — some in denial, most in an honorable effort to be a positive force for good within a broken system. For my part, I teamed up with Michael Matheson Miller, the Acton Institute, and Coldwater Media to interview over 200 people from 20 countries to produce education materials challenging conventional thinking, culminating in the Netflix release of Poverty, Inc. The film earned over 50 international film festival honors and won the $100,000 Templeton Freedom Award, but I’m most proud of how it transcended the American left-right political divide. There aren’t many things Michael Moore and John Stossel agree on.
A key insight from our work involved reframing poverty as a problem of a exclusion from institutions of justice, stifling networks of productivity and exchange. A prime example is the dysfunction of land title in low-income countries. As I toured the film festival circuit with Poverty, Inc. in 2014-2015, I began researching blockchain technology for property records. I joined the MIT Digital Currency Initiative and led a research engagement with the Mexican Government, which prioritized an intriguing problem in supply chain finance: warehouse receipts.
Warehouse receipts are title documents on stored goods, such as agricultural commodities or metals. They underpin trillions of dollars in global trade and derivatives. At their best, warehouse receipts help farmers access credit and get higher prices for their goods. But they’re plagued by countless frictions and billion-dollar frauds driving financial exclusion for farmers and systemic risk in asset-backed securities markets. With the hypothesis that the immutable, distributed ledger of a public blockchain could help, I made this the focus of my graduate work in finance at MIT Sloan.
Advised by former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson and MIT operations finance professor Nikos Trichakis, I teamed up with fellow MIT graduate student Henry Aspegren to lead the development of b_verify, an open-source protocol for publicly verifiable records. We built a prototype of a warehouse receipts registry utilizing the protocol, presented it to the the Inter-American Development Bank, which funded ongoing development, and published our work in the Journal of Management Science. I also had scholarship support as a Fellow at MIT Legatum Center for Entrepreneurship & Development, a special organization and community.
At MIT, I found my niche in this intersection between the science of technology and the human-centered design of real-world solutions. I was fortunate to meet a visionary named Dario Gil, now Director of IBM Research, who recruited me to help stand up the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a $240 million initiative for research scientists at MIT and IBM Research to collaborate on fundamental advancements in artificial intelligence. As a leader focused on our internal operations as well as our engagements with member companies, I get to work with some of the world’s smartest people on the creative challenge of bridging fundamental science to meaningful impact in healthcare, finance, construction, energy, and consumer technology. I am grateful to have found such a special space to work.
In life and in work, I seek both purpose and adventure, and these intertwine. Adventure is the pursuit into unknown territories. Into this unknown, purpose is necessarily adaptive, dynamic, nonlinear, and yet grounded in our core values. In embracing uncertainty, difficulty, and even pain, we grow in our ability to change the world, in small ways and in big ones.
Thank you for taking the time to get to know me.