Career goals & program highlights
Years of navigating healthcare as a neurodivergent patient brought me to the MS in Medical Cannabis Science and Therapeutics program. I came in with firsthand experience of how both modern and alternative medicine fail those who need them most. I began my career as a private equity accountant before turning to life coaching, mindfulness meditation teaching, and plant medicine education. I left my last position over egregious ethical violations by the organization's founders, then sustained a serious spinal injury that led me to this program.
Across my coursework and instructional design project, I integrated a trauma-informed and neurodiversity-affirming approach. The chatbot I developed for my Capstone is the culmination of the knowledge and skills I have gained over the last two years. It addresses the gap created by decades of stigma and restricted research, which has left providers without adequate training to have conversations with patients about cannabis.
After graduation, I plan to secure funding to continue the chatbot's development and pursue a PhD in Health Professions Education at the University of Maryland, with the chatbot as my focus of study. I will also explore teaching, consulting, and research opportunities at the intersection of cannabis, psychedelics, trauma, and neurodivergence. As Isabelle Stengers (2012), chemist and philosopher of science, writes:
“Some people love to divide and classify, while others are bridge-makers, weaving relations that turn a divide into a living contrast, one whose power is to affect, to produce thinking and feeling.”
— Isabelle Stengers, Reclaiming Animism, e-flux Journal (2012)
This is the bridge-making I am graduating from this program ready to put into practice.