As a child, I trained as a competitive gymnast. Before social work, I trained and performed as a dancer in New York City. Later I taught yoga in Nicaragua, in Hawaii and online, and maintain credentials with Yoga Alliance. Movement continues to teach me that alignment needs communication between the body and the mind. In my clinical work, I pair evidence-based approaches like CBT and DBT with trauma-informed, somatic, and yoga-based practice.

My most formative clinical years were in inpatient psychiatry, street outreach, and addiction treatment, with people in crisis whom many systems had already failed. That work is still my reference point for what safe, competent care looks like.

As an MSW student, I was a Hartford Partnership Program Fellow in aging-informed practice and education (HPPAE) and served as an NGO representative to the United Nations for the International Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse. I've spent extended time with local communities in Cuba, Brazil, and the Corn Islands off Nicaragua's Caribbean coast. I’ve reviewed statewide homelessness strategy for the State of Hawaii. Those experiences taught me to read policy from the ground up.

For a long time, I was reluctant to call myself a clinician. Much of the diagnostic framework I trained in rests on research and cultural assumptions that exclude the majority of lived human experience. I learned to use those tools well while asking whose experience they reflect and whose they leave out. I now bring that same question to AI.