About ME
So, if you’ve landed here, I’m guessing you want more detail about me than what is available on my landing page.
Who am I? I am an interdisciplinary social scientist by training, I hold a master’s degree in city planning from MIT, with a focus on housing, community and economic development. I also hold a Ph.D. in political economy from MIT.
Born in Buffalo, N.Y., most of my upbringing was spent on the road, traveling with my parents’ itinerant religious ministry work; their territory was the Eastern US and Canada. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa as a scholarship and Pell Grant student at the Johns Hopkins University with an honors bachelor’s degree in both Economics and in Sociology, as well as a certificate in Comparative and International Development, I immediately began a Ph.D. in Sociology at U.C. Berkeley, which I did not complete. This “failure” taught me the power of adopting a growth (rather than a fixed) mindset, something which often comes up in my teaching and research.
After dropping out of Berkeley, I moved to New York City, where I worked for 15 years in global urban development as a researcher, analyst, and strategist across five continents, before returning to the academy to earn two graduate degrees at MIT, thereafter joining the University of Toronto faculty for five years, before returning home to New York.
A lifelong participant in various social movements and political processes, I have also been a non-profit board member as well as a member-owner and active governance participant in a variety of cooperative and mutual enterprises across all three factors of production (land/housing, labor, capital).
When not working, you might find me singing Western classical music or roasting my own coffee. I live in Queens in a self-managed housing cooperative. I am also a former competitor, judge, and official in the sport of figure skating, in which I was a USFS Double Gold Test Medalist (Senior Free Skate/MIF).
