Who I am.(and who I'm not.)

I'm 35, and I spent five years as a bench researcher in academia, working on cystic fibrosis. I loved the work at first: the problem solving, the thought that I might be improving lives somewhere. Somewhere in there I also learned to ride (for years it was 3 bikes, 0 cars). But from 2016 on I increasingly felt like I was living in a different world than the people I rode with. And then COVID hit.

When COVID hit, I wasn't watching it on the news. I was working on it at the bench.

I saw first-hand what COVID did to our hospitals and worked on that research from the start. The pandemic also set off a strange series of events that ended with me changing careers: I spent the next five years in blockchain and privacy technology, building tools meant to give people control of their own money and their own data. The industry didn't live up to what I hoped it would be, and I won't pretend otherwise. But I left knowing how our financial system actually works, who it actually works for, and that privacy is worth writing into law.

My family had moved out East, so we decided on New Hampshire, where my wife went to college. I fell in love with it immediately: the winding roads, the changing seasons, the strong, unpretentious communities. We bought our forever home in Walpole, and are currently learning quite a bit about yard work.

I'm not a career politician. I've never held office, never worked a campaign, never even aspired to politics. I'm just sick of waiting around for someone else to step up and try to fix things.

Because I stand for something, and I don't see it on the ballot. I stand for an America that works for everyone: homes you can build, doctors you can see, a government allowed to do its job. There's a name for this now, the abundance agenda, and I'm glad it's catching on. Most of what stands between us and that country are old rules we wrote ourselves and refuse to fix.

Our economy is broken. Our systems are crumbling. Nobody is fighting for my generation, or the ones coming into adulthood now. Nobody is fighting like they understand the urgency and the desperation of our current moment.

We don't live in ordinary times. AI is displacing workers, inflation keeps outrunning paychecks, and there's brazen corruption in our highest offices. Yet all I see from my own party is platitudes, faux outrage, and career politicians moving up the ranks. Our leaders have held power for decades and mean to hold it until the day they die. For what? Most have never lived a normal working year in modern America. I'm 35. I'll be living with the Senate's choices for another fifty years. Enough is enough.