How I got here

I arrived at Rollins College in 2022 to study public policy and political economy. The summer after my first year, a student-faculty research fellowship with Dr. Yudit Kornberg Greenberg took me through three thousand years of history on how communities have used shared food to make peace. That research became a panel at the 2023 Parliament of the World's Religions and, later, a co-authored chapter in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Food.

It also left me with a practical question: could a shared meal still do that work on a polarized campus? That fall, I founded Breaking Bread to find out, and helped found the college's student interfaith council. Breaking Bread has since grown to the University of Central Florida and, most recently, Rhodes College.

Over the next three years, my focus widened from how food brings people together to how governments decide who has access to it. I served four years in student government, including a year as president, and in 2025 Phi Beta Kappa selected me as one of 20 Key into Public Service Scholars nationwide. I interned in the office of Rep. Gus Bilirakis and at the Florida House on Capitol Hill, trained AI models to identify political bias in news coverage, and studied the political economy of agricultural trade with Dr. Matthew Rice, research we later presented at the World Social Science Association. My honors thesis asked why state and local governments may be better equipped than federal programs to make nutritious food both accessible and affordable.

Across that work, I kept running into the same pattern: whether a good policy succeeds often depends on the legal tools behind it, such as a zoning ordinance, a state statute, or a governor's veto. That is why I'm pursuing law.

I graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 2026. I'm now completing the MITx MicroMasters in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy, and plan to begin law school in fall 2027.