About

I came to Kenya on a Fulbright in 2010, expecting to stay a year. I ended up helping build the research department at iHub, Nairobi’s first tech co-working space, during the years the East African tech ecosystem was first taking shape. I have been based in Nairobi ever since.

I have a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from UC Irvine, completed in 2021. The question that spurred me to do a PhD and continues to matters to me and shape my work since: why does research produced on and about communities tend to serve the knowledge needs of institutions elsewhere, and what would actually have to change for that to stop?

In the years since, I have raised over $5.7 million in funding, built and led research teams across East Africa, and grown CSIDNet from a conversation into a network of researchers working on climate, health, and community-led knowledge production. The thread across all of it is the same question: how do you build infrastructure that enables real collaboration without reproducing the hierarchies you set out to challenge? Fifteen years of getting that right and wrong in different contexts is what I bring to the work now.

I work with a small number of organizations each year, mostly international research networks, foundations, and knowledge organizations in the open science and philanthropy reform space, working on high-stakes convenings, research capacity building, or governance decisions where the structural choice and the values claim are not aligned.

I try to write about what I think about these questions on this site. If you want to talk, please reach out!