About

I grew up in Green River, Wyoming, and studied chemical engineering at the University of Wyoming. Green River is a trona town — soda ash is the local industry in the way that automobiles are the local industry in Detroit — so the path from engineering school into a continuous-process plant was not a decision so much as a continuation. I took the permanent position at the local trona mine for one honest reason as much as any other: it was the closest I could get to skiing the Cottonwood Canyons of Utah.

I spent two decades inside soda ash, bicarbonate, sesquicarbonate, and sulfate operations, starting on the process-engineering side and moving through production, plant management, and eventually OT/IT leadership. Each step was the same lesson at a different scale: a continuous-process plant never stops, never reboots, and never gets a second chance at a bad cutover. Technology decisions that start from that premise outperform the ones that don’t.

The pivot into cybersecurity was not a career break — it was a recognition that the control systems I had been specifying, commissioning, and operating for years were now the attack surface. I pursued the CISSP at this stage of my career specifically to put the operator’s perspective on the same footing as the security-practitioner’s. Too much OT security is written by people who have never had to hot-cut a DCS on a running unit, and it shows. I wanted the credential to sit alongside the experience.

Separately, I run rosettaSTEM, a project that converts handwritten STEM materials into screen-reader-accessible documents.

The writing on this site is about the intersection that my work keeps landing on: OT security, industrial AI governance, and the real operations those two topics are supposed to serve. I write from inside the plant, not from a consulting deck. The goal is to be useful to the people doing the work and honest about the tradeoffs that never make it into the vendor slideware.