We have crossed this gap twice. From the inside.

Employee #7 to Operations Executive

EnergyX

Lithium extraction · Minerals and water · 2021 to 2025

Director of Research → Senior Director of Operations

Held the most senior operations role in the organization, managing a team of 40+ people with 5 to 8 direct reports.

Joined as employee number seven and helped carry the company from a lab result to pilot and demonstration plants, a new headquarters and laboratory, and commercial project design. Sat on the executive team that set how many plants to build and what to spend against available cash, then delivered them: $40M+ in capex projects across processing plants, membrane manufacturing, and facility builds and renovations.

Bench data to steel in the ground. We know which decisions on that road you cannot take back.

Prototype to field fleet

TerraFirma

Robotics and AI for heavy civil construction · 2025 to 2026

Head of Operations and Business Development

Ran operations and business development while robots moved from the shop floor to field deployments: scoped and negotiated incentives for a new office, ran the renovation and the move into a 40,000 sq. ft. facility and a 10 acre robotic testing yard, built the customer pipeline and the internal BD and procurement tools that let technology, field execution, and sales scale at the same time, and supported investors through two financings.

Operating structure built under real growth pressure, in a business where uptime in the field is the product.

The foundation

Scientist turned operator

Ph.D., Chemistry, Texas A&M
MOFs for gas storage and separations

A scientist first. Every program since is designed the way a scientist designs an experiment.

Peer reviewed publications

25

h-index

19

Citations

3,777

Annual group publications as lab manager

27 → 61

1. 01Ran operations for a 30+ person research group: priorities, equipment, budget, and output, from year one
2. 02Designs R&D and operations programs as experiments: a hypothesis, a test plan, a measurement, and a decision rule before money is spent
3. 03Built data driven operations teams at EnergyX and TerraFirma, where every pilot, trial, and field run fed the next decision
4. 04Designs the AI tools operations run on: internal business development and procurement systems, and physics grounded prediction models on a company's own experimental data

Decisions from data, teams built to produce it fast, risk taken out early. That is where execution speed comes from.