About

I watched from my rooftop in Brooklyn as the World Trade Center towers fell.

Two days later, I drove a truck full of food supplies down to Ground Zero and worked my way onto a Disaster Task Force where I would spend the next three months coordinating supply logistics between the rescue and relief organizations on site. I arrived unprepared, unqualified, yet unwilling to walk away, and somewhere in the midst of my determination to make a difference in that chaos I experienced what is possible when the people you are standing shoulder to shoulder with share that same commitment. Everything I have accomplished over the last 20+ years started with that decision: to show up.

In those early days, the FDNY, the NYPD, the Salvation Army, the Steelworkers, the parish next door - each had strong communication inside its own walls. What none of them had, at that scale, was a way to talk to each other. So a handful of civilian volunteers became that layer: learning what each site needed, finding it from companies and private citizens who wanted to help, and getting it there - whether that meant a shipment of fireproof boots from Caterpillar to the police or clean socks and respirators at a relief station we kept stocked for months. We did not need to wait for instructions. The friction of hierarchy and division dissolved, and people showed up for each other, over and over again, to do things that seemed impossible. It was my first unbreakable team, and my first lesson in the thing I've been building ever since: the gap in a crisis is almost never effort or resources. It's coordinated resilience, and someone has to build it before it's needed.

The gap in a crisis is almost never effort or resources. It's coordinated resilience.

I went on to study exactly that, earning my master's degree in Media, Peace and Conflict Studies from the UN-mandated University for Peace, because I wanted to understand how communities hold together, and how they come apart, under pressure. It turned out to be the same discipline whether the pressure is a hurricane, a pandemic, or a startup doubling in size or solving an impossible problem. People Strategy is conflict transformation at low intensity. Crisis Strategy is the same practice at high intensity.

People Strategy is conflict transformation at low intensity. Crisis Strategy is the same practice at high intensity.

I've now spent more than two decades testing those lessons inside communities and startups at their most demanding moments.

I led the team that opened the first WeWork in Canada - and served as its spokesperson - and then built the global People policy framework as we grew to over 10,000 people across over 40 countries. In that same stretch I took on security and safety: the company's first emergency action plans for fire, evacuation, and workplace violence, its first EH&S standards, and the HR function's first business continuity plans - along with tabletop exercises alongside the security team and first aid and AED training I delivered myself to our community teams as a certified Red Cross instructor.

I built CloudKitchens' global HR function in under three years, supporting a scaling workforce from 300 to more than 4,000 employees across 30+ countries through a pandemic, which meant designing the health and safety standards for both our essential and non-essential workers across dozens of countries while owning every escalated employee crisis and the communications around it.

As Chief People Officer at Beren Therapeutics from early 2022 through late 2026, I led the work that built the team and the culture that carried a young pre-commercial biotech through a commercial scale-up to 'launch ready' - for a treatment that almost everyone else had given up on - and I owned the internal communications and executive advisory that held it together.

I've stayed in the field the whole time: Red Cross Disaster Action Teams and supporting the relocation of Katrina evacuees, hurricane relief in Houston after Harvey, and, most recently, three years as a certified confidential survivor's advocate on a rapid response team for survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault. I also continue to train, including Harvard's National Preparedness Leadership Initiative and FEMA's incident command trainings. Showing up is a skill you have to keep using.

And today, across different industries, from disaster sites to board rooms, I lead the same underlying work: building the systems and cultures that enable teams to navigate dynamic chaos and prolonged uncertainty toward enduring resilience, sustained performance, and breakthrough success. When a company is growing or changing faster than its structure can keep up, or anticipating a moment that could break it, someone has to build the coordination layer, embed accountability, cultivate trust, and test all of it before the pressure arrives. That work is more than inspiring speeches, office "perks," or catchy core values. It's intuitive, people-first infrastructure, designed deliberately, and proven under extreme pressure.

From disaster sites to board rooms, I lead the same underlying work: building the systems and cultures that enable teams to navigate dynamic chaos and prolonged uncertainty toward enduring resilience, sustained performance, and breakthrough success.

Leadership is not about having all the answers. It's about showing up, staying honest, and asking the right questions - and remembering that the only way through anything worth doing is together.