I always knew I was going to leave academia. I didn’t know when, how, or what I was going to do, but there was always something inside of me that said, “this isn’t right for me.” I had this inner voice that kept asking why science wasn’t leveraging existing knowledge in real-world contexts. I was often criticized for this line of thinking, but the disconnect between academia and industry never made any sense to me. 

When I got out of school, I started working in community settings in Omaha, Nebraska, where they had negative health outcomes and few resources. Using what I learned from my doctoral degree, I developed a community-centric women’s health intervention. It was based upon the premise of a book club and taught women how to value themselves enough to take better care of their physical and mental health. Following that, I started working with Udaya, an online consumer yoga platform, that enabled people to access live courses right from their homes. This was groundbreaking, not only in how it improved people’s physical and mental health but because it was in the early 2000s, far before any of the app innovations we have inside our pockets today. 

During this time, I experienced my own trauma when my daughter was stillborn at full term. This forever changed the course of my life and me as a person. It’s not a secret or anything I’m ashamed of. Yoga, in fact, became a huge factor in my own healing. I used yoga to help me cope and overcome what I was going through and realized, if yoga was helping me, it could help so many others. It soon became my mission to prove the value in yoga and get more people access to it. 

Recognizing an online approach was the best way to deliver yoga to people from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, I ended up getting my first NIH grant for a feasibility study using yoga to reduce PTSD in women who had experienced stillbirth. 

One of my colleagues who was working in cancer research at the time asked if what I was doing with yoga for women could be replicated for cancer patients. We ended up pursuing it and the data we uncovered from these patients’ experiences with yoga brought me to the meditation app, Calm. I was well aware of meditation, as it had become a staple in my healing journey in addition to yoga. But when our cancer patients told us meditation was even more powerful than yoga for them, it flipped the switch for me in a whole new way. 

Following this insight, I reached out to Calm, a 20-person company at the time, asking for free memberships for our research. They agreed and 2 years later, I followed up to show them how their product was helping people from a health perspective. They were pleasantly surprised and shortly after asked me if I’d be open to directing their science. 

To this day, I couldn’t be more grateful for that experience and being able to work with so many talented people. Lo and behold, getting there was the result of following my initial instinct — using what already existed to help people, then measuring the impact of it to help more.

Fast forward to today, and that’s still what my career is focused on. I followed my passion to build my own business, be my own boss, and become a Fractional Chief Science Officer, a title most people have never heard of nor recognized. 

My job today as a Fractional CSO is to align science with a business’s trajectory and goals, then weave it across all team roadmaps so it becomes a holistic revenue generator. My business is all about helping companies grow with a scientific foundation and sewing science into every aspect of their organization so they’re successful in the long run. I’m educating CEOs, informing business strategy, developing data points that convert sales and investors, helping companies understand their customers, and so much more. 

This journey has further ingrained in me that there’s no single way to “do” science. Science will always look different at every company and my job is to meet them where they’re at, understand what they need and where they’re trying to go, then use science to help them attain that.