who i am

One integrated life

Three threads that were never separate, and the through-line that connects them.

I never treated them as separate lives. The engineer, the mother, the student, they were always one person. What I did, somewhere in my twenties while I was working and raising babies and going to school all at once, was follow the same continuous question until it showed me the wholeness that was already there.

My mother and father planted the ground of it early. I am my thoughts, and my thoughts control the emotions that invoke my chosen action. It became how I show up, and it keeps me aware of the power I have to shape another life, most of all my children's.

three threads, one mind

Power Systems & the Grid

20+ years

Engineering, data, modernization.

Partner, Mother, Student

20+ years

The life that informs the work.

The Writing

7 years

Two podcasts, essays, two books.

The long way through the grid

Twelve years as a power systems engineering consultant. A system planning leader. Then Director of Grid Modernization at Duquesne Light, the utility that served the community I was raised in. Today I hold a PhD in electrical and computer engineering, teach at Carnegie Mellon, and lead strategy and nonprofit programs in the electric utility world.

Every one of those roles was the same thread pulled a little further. The value is not in any single program or asset, it is in the backbone underneath all of them, the shared data foundation most utilities still treat as plumbing. The work is to de-silo the silos, to give that backbone a language, and to fund it as the asset it is. I understood this intuitively for years before I could prove it.

It was never anecdotal. It is the terrain.

the chaordic age

The grid is entering the place where chaos and order meet. The organizations that thrive will stop fighting the chaos and start building the order underneath it.

after Dee Hock, founder of Visa

The same move whether you are running a grid or running a life.

Writing it down

The other twenty years I spent as a partner, a mother of six, and a perpetual student, and seven of them writing down what I learned about holding a full life without fracturing. Alignment over balance. Protective boundaries. Habits that survive contact with a real, busy life. That writing became two podcasts and two books, and a philosophy I still lead by. See the method →

This site is where the whole of it now lives. Not a store and not a pitch, a record of a body of work, offered freely to anyone who finds something useful in it, and a place that keeps growing as I do.

a living resume

Who I am, kept current

VP, Technical StrategyAssociation of Edison Illuminating Companies

Program DirectorCenter for Operational Excellence · nonprofit programs

Adjunct ProfessorCarnegie Mellon University

PhD, Electrical & Computer EngineeringUniversity of Pittsburgh

Host, Grid Mod Pod80+ episodes on grid modernization

AuthorTwo books on integrated living

Partner & mother of sixThe title that informs the others

Formerly, Director of Grid ModernizationDuquesne Light, the utility that served the community I was raised in

Before that, System Planning LeaderPower delivery and system planning

And twelve years, Power Systems Engineering ConsultantAcross the grid

A resume that is not frozen in a PDF. As the work grows, this grows with it.