My journey in health started when I was very young. I was an avid athlete and an injury caused me to pay attention to my body at an early age. I wanted to figure out how I could get back onto the court and field as fast as possible. I also became an unofficial performance coach for a lot of my teammates, as I would read up on different training techniques and supplements, and share those ideas with those looking for a performance advantage. This interest led me to eventually pursuing a master’s degree in exercise physiology at Florida State University, the only program in the country at that time that offered both sports nutrition and exercise physiology in one program.
After I graduated at the top of my class with my master’s degree, I went to work for Dean Ornish at the Preventive Medicine Research Institute at UCSF. Our research team conducted studies on lifestyle and disease.
I was a part of the prostate cancer lifestyle team. We worked with 185 prostate cancer patients to assess if a multifactorial lifestyle program had an impact on disease progression. It was a fascinating study to be a part of as we were not looking to see if one particular factor had a positive impact, but rather if a combination of factors could yield extraordinary results. In this trial, the participants gathered once a week in Sausalito for a collective session to work on communication skills with their spouse to lower daily stress levels, meditation, exercise programming progress with an exercise physiologist, diet with a nutritionist, and more. While a previous study looking at a similar combination had very impressive results in cardiovascular disease, this study did not yield the same magnitude of effects for prostate cancer. Yet, my experience there left an indelible impression on me. I realized that this holistic approach was unique and had great potential. Over the next twenty years, it would be something that stayed on my mind and something I knew I would come back to.
From there, I went to work at a biotechnology company called DoubleTwist. This company was involved in the race to be the first to sequence the human genome. A big part of what we did was to annotate the genome with useful information for biomedical researchers to assist in their drug development process. It was during this time that I discovered my love for organizational systems to maximize performance of a team. While I started in sales, which was a very technical role, typically working with the heads of biology or genomics at various biotech and pharma companies, I was promoted to the role of a cross-functional team manager. In this role, I develop systems that enabled more effective communication between the various product directors and the global sales team.
After DoubleTwist shut down, I was hired by Orphan Medical, which had a drug for the sleep disorder, narcolepsy. I started in sales and became the number one sales person in the country. After that first year, I transitioned to become the first Medical Science Liaison for Orphan, where I would travel to different regions and have technical scientific discussions with thought leaders in those areas. In 2004, Jazz Pharma acquired Orphan Medical. Jazz created a new role for me where I worked directly under the Chief Medical Officer to build a new department. As the first member of the Medical Affairs team, I helped build out all department functions and hired 25 scientists and clinicians to staff the department. I oversaw all scientific research grants, ultimately supporting over 30 research trials. I also had a key role in scientific publications, medical education, medical information, and assisting the marketing team with all post-FDA approval communications.
During my time at Jazz, guidelines for how pharma should support independent research was lacking. Therefore, I started an industry organization called IISRA — The Investigator-Initiated Sponsored Research Association to discuss best practices on how to do this. IISRA grew to over 200 professional members, and we had three live meetings a year, one in Europe and two in the United States. To orchestrate our activities, I assembled an executive committee that included representatives from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Genzyme and others, and I served as the Executive Director for the first three years of the organization. I'm proud to say that during my tenure, we worked with the FDA and were able to get them to adopt our proposal on best practices. The IISRA guidelines are now the official FDA guidelines for industry supported grant research. I then handed over the reins to Karen Bartels, Director of the Oncology Business Unit Global Medical at AstraZeneca, as the new Executive Director to replace me when I left Jazz to pursue my PhD.
Having worked in the sleep field for almost a decade, I decided to pursue a PhD in neuroscience focusing on ecologically relevant sleep loss (i.e., common sleep loss levels in society) and the possible effects on eating behavior. My research funding came from Stanford where I worked with Jed Black, MD, Director of the Stanford Sleep Clinic; the first sleep clinical in the world. I also worked with Jamie Zeitzer, PhD in the Zeitzer Circadian Biology Lab at Stanford. In the Netherlands, at Leiden University, I worked with Hanno Pijl, MD, PhD, Head of Diabetes at Leiden University Hospital, and neurologist Gert Jan Lammers, MD; a globally-recognized clinical expert on the sleep disorder of narcolepsy.
In the beginning of my PhD, I took some time to explore human behavior. From this research, I developed my own behavior model called the Look Model to Adopt and Support Health Behaviors. I had the opportunity to present this model at Stanford Medicine X, Health 2.0, and at UC Berkeley. As I continued my PhD research, I started a company aimed to leverage the behavior model that I created to help individuals develop better lifestyle-based health practices. This company is called humanOS and is still in existence today. Our podcast, humanOS Radio, also became the official podcast of the Sleep Research Society and the Canadian Sleep Society. In this show, we not only explored sleep, but all things that influence lifestyle-based health outcomes.
In 2021 the company Restore Hyper Wellness reached out to me over LinkedIn. This company was relatively early in the recovery space, which I believed had potential. Restore acquired humanOS and I became their Chief Health Architect, serving as Chief Scientist and Head of Product. I focused the product vision on Performance Medicine, and designed a two-year strategy plan to implement this vision. This plan was adopted by the board and is currently being implemented across their fleet of franchise centers. When I completed the plan, I recommended to the CEO that I be replaced by a Chief Medical Officer — someone with extensive clinical experience to lead the development of this medical plan. I stayed on for another six months in a active consulting role to help with a smooth transition. This performance medicine vision was right for the company, but my heart is in the performance wellness space (i.e., lifestyle), not the performance medicine space (i.e., hormones, peptides), so I knew it was right for me to move on.
At this point, I reached out to the people whom I respect most in the performance wellness space — the current Vivendi Health team — to discuss an idea I had been considering for half a decade. With these experts, we started to explore the ideal conditions to help an individual achieve extraordinary results in personal health. This was the beginning of Vivendi Health, and we began working with beta clients to test our ideas and methods. In all of my career so far, this work has been the most satisfying. When working at scale, you try to help a lot of people do a little better in key areas. At Vivendi, we get to work deeply with individuals over time and watch them transform into a form of a health expert themself: an expert about their health in their life. We get to help people understand themselves, their nature, and the major influences on their daily experience, we get to craft deeply personal plans that will undoubtedly shape their future in positive ways. We get to know our clients deeply, helping them through challenges, and experiencing with them the thrill of their success. This is the most satisfying work because, as a team, we get to use our skills to a maximal degree, and because we know it’s the best support for health our clients can find.