My Story
Throughout my life, I've been collecting pieces of myself across vastly different worlds, and I'm finally ready to assemble them into something unprecedented.
​
Picture this: a factory worker's daughter in Oklahoma, surrounded by the hum of machinery and the quiet dignity of people who endure manual labor, dreaming of big cities that sparkled beyond any horizon I could see. I was always the outlier—the one asking different questions, imagining different answers. My parents couldn't map the territory I wanted to explore, but they handed me the most powerful tool they knew: an unshakeable belief that education could rewrite any story.
​
So I rewrote mine. Not just once, but repeatedly. First college graduate in my entire extended family? Check. Doctorate degree? Done. I climbed the academic ladder and found my calling in the intricate landscape of eating disorders. A place where psychology meets physiology, where healing happens in the spaces between what we believe about ourselves and what is actually true.
I am now internationally recognized in this field, which still feels surreal when I remember that girl who felt so out of place growing up in Oklahoma. I've built something meaningful in my career, helped countless people reclaim their lives, and contributed to research that makes a difference.
​
My career brought me to Los Angeles—that dream city I used to imagine—and where I met my husband, who works in Hollywood (believe-it-or-not, he is from the SAME town in Oklahoma where I grew up, but we had never crossed paths!). We are raising two kids who are as brilliantly unconventional as I felt growing up, but in this case, they get to be weird in the best possible way, with all the support and possibility imaginable.
And now? I'm standing at the threshold of my second act as a healthtech visionary. Armed with decades of clinical insight, research expertise, and the outsider's perspective that has always been my secret weapon. I'm ready to scale healing in ways that my factory-working roots understand—build something that works, build it to last, and make it available to everyone who needs it.
The girl who never fit in Oklahoma is exactly who the startup world needs to shake things up.