About

I’m the Director of Financial Aid at Lemoore College, in California’s Central Valley. For 20 years, my job has lived at the intersection of state and federal regulations, institutional capacity, and student need… three things that rarely move at the same speed. Title IV compliance doesn’t leave room for theoretical answers; every interpretation has to survive an audit, every process has to work for the student in front of you, not the student the policy assumed.

That’s the lens I’ve started turning on AI. Not “can this model do the task,” but “what happens when this tool meets a real institution,” and that institution’s incentives, constraints, and people who are skeptical for good reason. I hold an Ed.D., and my dissertation research (logistic regression across 7,729 community college students) found that one of the state’s own mandated interventions had a null-to-negative effect on the outcome it was supposed to improve. That finding has shaped how I evaluate every technical rollout I’ve touched since: mandates and good intentions don’t guarantee impact. Implementation is where the truth comes out.

I’ve since built and led AI tools inside my own institution: a retrieval-grounded compliance assistant, an audit-defensible documentation workflow, and a cross-functional AI work group bridging staff who’ve never touched these tools with the few who already have. I’m looking for the next place where that same combination of regulatory depth, technical fluency, and an instinct for where implementation actually breaks, is useful.