About

I work on problems at the intersection of local government, institutional design, and accountability—often by building tools and documenting systems that are usually opaque.

My background spans engineering, medicine, and public service. I’m a trained engineer and a board-certified anesthesiologist, with prior service in the U.S. Air Force and Navy Reserves and as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras, where I worked on small-scale infrastructure projects. Across those experiences, I became interested in how high-stakes systems succeed or fail based on incentives, information flow, and institutional design.

More recently, I’ve focused on local government. I’m the creator of NY Benchmark, a database and website that transforms decades of local government financial data into comparable, audit-trailed metrics. The project grew out of hands-on work reading municipal financial reports and has expanded into a broader effort to document best practices and dysfunction where transparency infrastructure exists.

This blog is where I write longer-form analyses: historical case studies, policy design issues, and observations that don’t fit cleanly into a dataset but matter for understanding how government actually operates.

The views here are my own, and the work is driven by evidence rather than ideology.

Earlier writing includes work on medicine, civic institutions, political economy and the technical/exploritory work that lead to my current projects.