Through doctoral research, entrepreneurship, and school partnerships – my work focuses on chronic absenteeism, counselor workflow, school funding, and student success.
“The students most at risk rarely arrive at our attention with a flag. They arrive, when they arrive at all, through the accumulated weight of small, missed signals.”
I build and study education systems that help schools identify students earlier, support them better, and improve outcomes at scale.
The work began in 2003, teaching for The Princeton Review — where the first hard lesson was that the students who needed the most attention were the easiest to overlook. Two decades later, the question has only sharpened: how do the systems around a student notice them in time?
In 2007, he founded Educational Partnerships, a formative assessment company built around state summative exams — beginning with the California High School Exit Exam. It was the first time he saw, at scale, how the right data placed in the right hands could change a student’s trajectory.
In 2013, he founded Horizon Education, an SAT and ACT formative assessment and digital curriculum company. Over the next nine years he scaled the platform to 29 states and hundreds of thousands of students before selling the company to a private equity fund in 2022.
That decade of building led him, somewhat unexpectedly, back to graduate school. At Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and now in doctoral study at UPenn, his research focuses on the role of high school counselors in addressing chronic absenteeism — the quiet crisis behind most of the noisier ones.
In 2025, he founded Unified Track: software that turns fragmented student data into earlier action, stronger support, and measurable outcomes for the counselors and administrators doing the actual work. Across his three companies, he has raised over $3M from angel groups and venture capital funds.
“The work I care about doesn’t sit cleanly inside any one of those rooms. It’s in the spaces between — between research and practice, between school and software, between knowing something and being able to act on it.”
Founder. Scholar. Practitioner. The labels matter less than the through-line: a career-long attempt to make sure students get seen, sooner, by the adults trying to help them.
Doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania, built on a foundation of K–12 leadership training at Harvard. The through-line is operational: how high school counselors actually navigate the work of supporting students who are quietly disengaging.
A comparative field study across multiple U.S. high schools, examining how counselors interpret attendance signals and decide which students to intervene with — and how the organizational structure around them enables or constrains that judgment.
Concentrated study of school-level leadership, organizational behavior, and the design of instructional and support systems inside American public schools. The foundation for every question the doctoral work now asks.
Graduate coursework in venture design, product-market fit, and the practice of building durable companies — completed mid-stride while scaling Horizon Education across the country.
Graduate training in international markets, cross-border strategy, and the operating mechanics of global enterprise — the commercial fluency underneath every venture that followed.
Education companies built in partnership with schools — not sold at them. Each was an attempt to translate something specific about district reality into software that holds up to it.
An operational layer for K–12 student success. Unified Track unifies SIS, attendance, and behavioral data into a counselor-facing workflow that surfaces the right student at the right moment — turning fragmented signals into earlier intervention.
SAT and ACT formative assessment and digital curriculum company. Scaled to 29 states and hundreds of thousands of students before being acquired by a private equity fund in 2022. The decade taught the founder how districts actually buy, deploy, and live with educational software — lessons that now shape Unified Track from day one.
Formative assessment company focused on state summative exams, beginning with the California High School Exit Exam. The first venture in a long line of work translating high-stakes assessment data into earlier, more equitable academic intervention.
Districts adopt what their teachers and counselors will actually use. Procurement is only the door.
The most elegant feature dies the moment it adds a step to an already-overloaded counselor's day.
If the district can't see the impact, the district can't sustain the contract. Measurement is product.
The most useful work tends to start as a conversation. Below are the conversations most likely to lead somewhere — though there are always exceptions, and good exceptions are welcome.
Partnership-led pilots and deployments through Unified Track. We build with schools — not at them — and prioritize counselor and administrator workflow above all else.
Inquire about a pilotOpen to co-authored studies, mixed-methods fieldwork, and dissertation committees aligned with K–12 student-success, counselor capacity, and chronic absenteeism.
Discuss a collaborationAvailable for conferences, podcasts, panels, and editorial features on education systems, founder experience, and the practitioner-scholar approach.
Request availabilitySelective advisory work with mission-aligned edtech founders, foundations, and education-focused investment teams. Limited capacity; long-term relationships preferred.
Submit an introductionI read everything personally. Districts, researchers, founders, press, and the occasional curious counselor — all welcome. A short note about who you are and what you’re working on is the quickest way in.
Most of the best collaborations have started with a paragraph rather than a pitch deck. Tell me what you’re working on, what you’re stuck on, or what you’re curious about.
If you’re a school or district, share where you are in your year and what the counseling team is wrestling with. If you’re a researcher, share your question. If you’re a journalist, share your angle.
Brevity is welcome; clarity is essential.