I’m an entrepreneur, writer, and human-centered designer based on a little farm in British Columbia. As a founder at Croft, I get to work on enduring hydrogen equipment for humanity’s toughest jobs – from rural agriculture and heavy transportation to humanitarian efforts, firefighting, emergency services and defense. We’re working on a blueprint for a hydrogen economy that is enduring, local and clean, a new future for energy. And we’re building a great team, so if this sounds like your calling I hope you’ll get in touch with me, or follow our journey on Instagram.

I’ve spent the last 15 years designing technology for off-grid use, from remote communities in East Africa to an historic farm in British Columbia. In 2010 I co-founded a social enterprise called Medic, to build open source technology for healthcare in hard to reach communities. Medic serves as technical steward of the Community Health Toolkit open source project, which has supported over 69 million caring activities to date and has over 41,000 end users in Africa and South Asia. Medic’s work has been recognized with a Skoll Award for social entrepreneurship, and I received an Echoing Green fellowship, was inducted into the Better World by Design hall of fame, and twice was named to Forbes’ list of the top 30 social entrepreneurs under the age of 30.

As Chief Research Officer I established a thriving open science network around Medic’s open source projects, and in 2020 I launched Medic Labs to incubate breakthroughs in precision public health. My research on human-centered design and innovation management has won several scholarly awards and been well cited and widely read. My design work emerges from human problems rather than academic discourses, as a result my writing is highly interdisciplinary and has been published in scientific journals across the fields of management and organizational theory, information systems, computer science, human-computer interaction, technology for development, statistics, and global health. I also enjoy discussing technology, design, and humanitarian work for a broad public audience, with outlets such as Commonweal Magazine, National Geographic: News Watch, The Oregonian, and TEDx talks.

In free time you’ll find me tending my small orchard or writing about how human-centered designers are solving complex humanitarian problems. I’m fortunate to have a supportive intellectual environment for my writing as a faculty member at The University of Washington, where I’m affiliated with the Global Health and the Human Centered Design & Engineering departments. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where I was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. My research is available on Google Scholar, and if you’d like to get in touch you can reach me on LinkedIn.