February 2026

I have long been interested in schools—and universities—as centers of community: places where relationships, resources, and shared purpose converge. Early in my life, I experienced schools not only as instructional spaces but as civic and relational hubs, a perspective shaped both by my upbringing and by seeing educational institutions from the inside.

Over time, this interest expanded beyond individual classrooms or projects toward the broader systems that make meaningful engagement possible—or impossible. As my work has evolved, I have become increasingly focused on the infrastructures that shape how community-engaged research is imagined, supported, recognized, and sustained. This includes the social, organizational, cultural, and technical systems that determine whether collaborative work with communities flourishes or falters.

Community-engaged research is widely valued in principle but often poorly supported in practice. Scholars and community partners frequently navigate unclear expectations, fragmented resources, misaligned incentives, and evaluation systems that struggle to recognize relational, long-term, and community-defined impacts. These gaps contribute to what I often describe as the “ivory curtain”—a separation that obscures how universities work, whose knowledge counts, and who benefits from research.

My current work seeks to address these challenges by shifting the focus from isolated projects to networks and infrastructures. Rather than asking, “How do we do one good community-engaged project?”, I ask, “What systems, norms, tools, and metrics are needed so that community-engaged research can be done well, repeatedly, and sustainably across an institution?”

At its core, I see community-engaged research as essential to rebuilding trust between higher education and society. By making research processes more transparent, accountable, and reciprocal—and by valuing community expertise as integral rather than supplemental—community-engaged research helps pull back the ivory curtain and reassert the university’s public purpose.

In my role as Faculty Fellow in Community Engaged Research, my impact is increasingly indirect but broader in scope. Instead of centering on a single community or intervention, my work focuses on strengthening the conditions that enable high-quality community-engaged research across disciplines and contexts.

This work is explicitly oriented toward institutional trust-building. By clarifying what community-engaged research is, how it is evaluated, and how communities are involved throughout the research lifecycle, these efforts help demystify the university and make its commitments more legible and credible to the public. In this way, community-engaged research functions not only as a methodological approach, but as a mechanism for renewing higher education’s social contract.

At a broader level, this work contributes to national conversations about how research universities—particularly urban R1 institutions—can renegotiate their relationships with communities through accountable, reciprocal, and values-driven scholarship.

What motivates me most is infrastructure-building as a form of care. Thoughtfully designed infrastructures—whether social, technical, or organizational—can make collaboration more humanizing, more just, and more effective. They can also signal, in very tangible ways, that universities take their responsibilities to communities seriously.

I am especially drawn to the moments when people begin to see themselves as part of a larger ecosystem: when faculty realize they are not working alone, when community partners see their expertise reflected in institutional language and processes, and when the work itself helps dissolve the distance implied by the ivory curtain.

I enjoy taking walks and hiking, traveling, and spending time with my wife and two grown children. Although it’s technically kind of like research, I also enjoy working with the R statistical programming language as a way to think through problems, create visualizations, and model complex ideas, relationships, and phenomena.

Student involvement looks different right now than it has in the past. Due to recent federal funding decisions, I do not currently have grant-supported positions for students on my research projects. Even so, students remain central to my thinking and to the longer-term goals of this work.

Much of my current focus is on building the infrastructures—conceptual, institutional, and technical—that will support future community-engaged research projects and create more sustainable opportunities for student involvement when funding conditions shift.

Community members are engaged less as “participants” and more as co-authors of systems and meaning. In infrastructure-focused work, this often takes the form of consultation, co-definition, validation, and governance rather than discrete data collection moments.

Their perspectives shape how community-engaged research is defined, what counts as impact, and how success is measured. This ensures that the infrastructures being built do not simply serve academic convenience, but reflect community priorities and lived realities.

Looking ahead, my work is focused on strengthening practical supports for community-engaged research across the university. This includes continuing to refine shared definitions and evaluation frameworks that help make this work more visible and understandable, while still respecting its relational and community-centered nature.

I am also working on modest, well-scoped tools and processes that help scholars and community partners document and reflect on their work without adding unnecessary burden. In parallel, I remain attentive to how emerging technologies, including AI, might be used carefully and responsibly to support these efforts rather than reshape them in ways that conflict with community-engaged values.

Finally, I am continuing to invest in relationship-building through faculty and community networks. These spaces provide opportunities for shared learning, mutual support, and incremental change in how community-engaged research is practiced and supported. Taken together, these efforts aim to help make community-engaged research more sustainable, more transparent, and more integrated into everyday academic life.