For me, nothing beats the thrill of learning, of understanding a new model of the world that can explain something that before seemed so random, unpredictable, and confusing.

At age 36 I was incredibly fortunate to have an opportunity to start over, to go down a new path, to follow my curiosity and see where it took me. I had recently burnt out from an intense 13-year career in the financial industry. While I found financial success, I struggled to justify the intensity of my efforts towards helping banks understand and manage their complex risks. I wondered with my mentor at BlackRock if our 80-hour work weeks were really making the financial system safer. And while I spent a career analyzing data and building models to forecast the future, I still found the world to be unpredictable in most regards. I became aware of emerging technologies that sounded like magic, things like bioengineering and artificial intelligence. I felt anxious and restless that I didn’t understand how they work, and that I had been on a trajectory to simply study their after-effects.

My initial idea was to dial my career back, spend half of my time on consulting engagements and the other half exploring these interests. But the pandemic struck before I could begin my next engagement and I was stuck at home with nothing but the entire internet of information at my fingertips. I discovered that our understanding of life and of the mind had advanced tremendously in the two decades since I had last taken a science class. I realized that biology is not just magical gooey stuff with impossible to remember terminology but a computational information processing system that can be understood and even programmed!

I was completely hooked. I signed up for online biology and chemistry classes at my local community college. I subscribed to Nature and New Scientist. I read books and watched documentaries covering the great discoveries of human knowledge, from relativity and electricity to CRISPR and machine learning. In 2021 I moved to San Diego to study bioengineering at UCSD, and I worked in a lab with folks trying to program bacteria to locate cancerous tumors and deliver chemotherapy. I took as many courses as possible on neurobiology and cognition, trying to find the common patterns at different scales that produce intelligent behavior, from cells to brains to societies.

In December 2022 in the second year of my master’s program, I came across ChatGPT, and I was blown away by the potential of generative AI. The toughest question for me was what’s the coolest thing I can imagine using this technology for?

The answer was obvious: education. I imagined a future classroom in which the only barrier to new knowledge was the desire to obtain it. Students can only understand new concepts by building on their current knowledge bases, so differences in baseline knowledge are exacerbated as students move through each lesson and grade. The gap widens. Tools like ChatGPT or K-12 specific ones like Khanmigo enable anyone to approach a new concept from their current knowledge base, ask unlimited questions, say “I don’t understand” without judgement, and identify and address the critical missing concepts. If used correctly, they can not only help close these gaps but give every student, regardless of their backgrounds and identities, the confidence that they can learn anything they want, that they are not limited to the professions of their relatives and neighbors, and that race, gender, nationality and any other identities are not barriers to the life one desires.

I earned my master’s degree in June 2023 and shifted my focus to researching generative AI: its capabilities and limitations, the content creation tools, how it compares to biological intelligence, how models are trained, how it will impact the economy, our lives, work, health, our understanding of the world, etc. 

I am very fortunate to have crossed paths with HTH. I knew it was a special place when I taught a chemistry class there in March 2024, was introduced to project-based learning, and spoke with teachers at the school who were highly engaged with their students and finding better ways to help their students learn. It seemed like a perfect setting to learn about teaching and education and to share my knowledge and perspective of emerging technologies.

I believe the role of teachers in future classroom aligns to my leadership approach: to make my first goal to discover what interests and motivates students, share my enthusiasm and joy for learning, encourage self-driven curiosity and nuanced understanding, offer multiple perspectives on complex issues, focus on the learning process over specific content, and cultivate self-belief and a sense of agency in creating a future to be excited about.