Selected Case Studies

A state-sponsored information-operations campaign targeting a U.S. ally, investigated for a top-tier U.S. law firm during a period of acute diplomatic sensitivity.

Led the multi-year international investigation and worked it hands-on — mentoring and directing the analyst team while monitoring social media for attempts to manipulate public opinion and incite social unrest, and authoring dozens of lengthy investigative reports. Synthesized all reporting, constructed the investigative link charts, and presented findings to legal teams and senior government leadership abroad.

Evidenced coordinated inauthentic behavior across the networks by correlating account-creation timing, posting cadence and automation signatures, duplicated content, self-reported location anomalies, and posting-application fingerprints into account-level datasets. Developed original attribution tradecraft — reverse-tracing embedded analytics code and ad-network identifiers to expose networks of seemingly independent propaganda sites — and produced litigation-grade products in i2 Analyst's Notebook, including 315-entity link charts.

Catalogued tens of thousands of inauthentic accounts across numerous campaigns; drove platform enforcement that suspended inauthentic accounts for terms-of-service violations; supported international litigation efforts.

Recruited by former senior U.S. intelligence officers into a firm fusing open-source intelligence and digital atmospherics with the physical protection of people and institutions that were high-value targets of terrorist and criminal threats.

Built the firm's first OSINT capability from the ground up — evaluating and selecting the tool suite, writing the workflows, and building and training the analyst team. I ran the analytic work myself: threat assessments, protective-intelligence products, and narrative- and sentiment-analysis for companies ahead of major public milestones. Deployed overseas as the embedded OSINT lead for a professional sports league's international games.

Geofenced digital "tripwires" around venues, hotels, airports, arenas, and movement routes; ran 24/7 surface-, deep-, and dark-web threat and narrative monitoring, feeding real-time digital atmospherics straight to the physical-security operators on the ground; managed satellite communications and field equipment on deployment.

Built a capability that differentiated the firm in a competitive market, resulting in its acquisition by DynCorp International, a global defense-services company. Clients and principals included a former big-city mayor, the founder-CEO of a major technology company, a Fortune 500 founding family, and a major international sporting organization. On one high-risk event, I earned enough trust that an allied nation's intelligence service made a policy exception to embed me alongside their team overseas.

A global technology platform serving billions of users, rebuilding its user-data safeguards under the largest FTC privacy enforcement action in U.S. history — and the consent decree that followed. I led this work as a senior privacy program manager with the law firm Venable.

First ran cross-functional escalation response to the platform's high-risk incidents — data-scraping and cybersecurity cases — coordinating legal, security, engineering, and executive teams from intake through resolution. I then took on the bigger contribution: pioneering a user-data privacy safeguard program that did not previously exist, mandated under the platform's FTC consent order to evaluate and rebuild its safeguards across the entire data lifecycle.

Started with a gap analysis — inventorying the platform's existing internal safeguards against what the consent order required — then reverse-engineered those requirements into a repeatable evaluation methodology. Built the documentation and criteria to assess each safeguard — its scope, function, whether it was active and fit for purpose, and whether it needed to be rehoused or redesigned — ran structured, question-by-question interviews with engineering teams, and mapped and tracked every safeguard through redesign and re-verification. Then scaled the program beyond myself, bringing on and directing additional analysts who drove individual safeguards to completion.

A repeatable privacy program that carried the platform's mandated safeguards from evaluation through redesign and re-verification — raising the standard of protection for its users, satisfying the FTC consent order, and leaving both processes and a team that outlived my engagement.

The Department of Defense's premier institution for higher education in the cyberspace domain and information environment — needing to expand its reach and profile across government, industry, academia, and the private sector, and to give its leadership a clear picture of its own engagement footprint.

Turned a written strategic plan into running programs across several fronts. Renewed a portfolio of 30+ lapsed academic agreements — updated to the college's current offerings and credit-transfer pathways — on a status dashboard I built. Stood up the college's first alumni community from scattered records, re-engaged it through events and a private network, and ran the selection committee that seated its inaugural executive board. Helped plan the flagship cyber conference — organizing panels and managing speaker invitations — represented the college at conferences across DC, and wrote the communications behind it all: one-pagers, briefings, brochures, and a consistent voice across the website and social channels. Delivered speech writing and executive decision-support to senior leadership, including a university-wide nodal analysis at the president's — a three-star admiral's — request.

Treated the plan as distinct workstreams — academia, the fellowship, alumni, events, communications — and built a roadmap for each. Designed the reporting systems by interviewing faculty and leadership separately about their needs and long-standing blockers, then building automated collection-and-visualization systems that served both — and applied OSINT link-analysis tradecraft to map and measure the university's external relationships by frequency and impact.

A written strategic plan turned into a running operation. Left behind durable engagement infrastructure — an inaugural alumni community and executive board, a renewed academic portfolio, automated reporting dashboards, and a full communications suite — plus a network of new professional relationships spanning the conference's co-hosts, its invited speakers, and the DC digital-asset community.

Pre-deployment training exists to build the cultural intelligence Marines need for the foreign operating environments they enter. The Mediterranean is one of the hardest to read: at once a border and a bridge, it connects three continents and spans three combatant commands — EUCOM, AFRICOM, and CENTCOM — yet each treats it as the edge of its own map, so the crossings, security flows, and population movements that run across the whole sea fall between them. I was the sole subject-matter expert responsible for that cross-command seam.

Designed and taught dozens of operational-culture courses — on individual countries, regions, and cross-cutting regional issues — and, as part of a mobile training team, traveled to bases to deliver them and answer requests for information. Taught across every level of rank and responsibility, from small teams to theaters of hundreds, so Marines could anticipate how their actions would land in foreign operating environments and how local populations would respond.

Analyzed each operating environment through the lenses of physical geography, economy, social structure, political structure, and belief systems — an anthropological method sharpened by a background in culture studies, first-hand field research, and in-country researcher networks I built to ground the analysis in local perspective.

4,000+ Marines trained across 100+ pre-deployment briefings — more than doubling the section's annual course output; hand-picked to build and teach a Levant course for international officers at the Expeditionary Warfare School. Recognized with the Eagle Award.

The Mediterranean at the height of a record refugee and irregular-migration crisis, along some of the deadliest maritime migration routes in the world — reshaping the security and humanitarian picture across the region.

Worked the issue from the ground to the policy level. It began with ethnographic field research on migration in the region during my graduate studies in Malta. At Navanti, I built a system to monitor, track, and report maritime-migration incidents over time — compiling the underlying database and the figures behind it — delivering ongoing reporting on the crisis for special-operations clients. For the Marine Corps, I built specialized courses on refugees, human rights, humanitarian law, and irregular migration, preparing Marines to understand the human picture and to operate in humanitarian-assistance and disaster-relief missions. I authored analysis on the crisis — including a sole-authored policy brief on sustainable responses — and presented my research on the Mediterranean migration crisis at an international migration symposium in Tunis.

Combined qualitative and quantitative approaches: ethnographic field research; a systematic incident-tracking database that turned scattered migration events into structured, reportable trends; and policy analysis of the international refugee framework, identifying political disunity, the asylum-transit policy gap, and outdated 1951/1967 legal definitions as the core impediments to a sustainable response.

Gave special-operations clients a clearer, quantified picture of the crisis — its scale and the maritime routes I mapped and tracked; raised the situational awareness of Marines deploying to the region for the humanitarian-assistance and disaster-relief missions they might face; produced two published analyses — a policy brief for EuroMeSCo and an article for Middle East Studies at Marine Corps University; and, as the first American invited, presented my research at the Tunis migration symposium.

Bitcoin is open, permissionless, borderless, non-sovereign money — digitally scarce, transparently auditable, and secured by a decentralized network rather than any government, bank, or intermediary. It is not only a financial asset but a technological network: a base-layer protocol on which new digital infrastructure gets built. Its implications reach across finance, technology, human rights, and national security — banking the unbanked, widening open and accessible markets, reshaping strategic deterrence, and ushering in conversations around decentralized financial assets and the separation of money and state. Yet institutions still tend to treat it only as a financial asset.

At the law firm Venable, I brought blockchain-traceability awareness to live incident response, and delivered a firm-wide lecture on digital assets, tokenization, and consensus mechanisms to its legal and cybersecurity professionals. At National Defense University, I briefed faculty and military leadership on the strategic-deterrence and national-security implications of the Bitcoin protocol, and developed relationships with leaders across the digital-asset space to bring outside expertise into the institution.

Built on years of independent study and MIT Professional Education's "Blockchain: Disruptive Technology" certificate — analyzing the differences between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake consensus mechanisms, and reading widely on the gold, fiat, and Bitcoin standards and their societal implications. I examine money the way I examine any environment: from first principles and through an anthropological lens — as a store of value across both time and space, and a technology that shapes the societies built on it.

Planted seeds where little understanding existed. At NDU, I convened the first-ever panel on the subject at the college's flagship annual conference, laid the groundwork for an elective course, and engaged alumni who went on to move into the space. At Venable, my blockchain-forensics guidance changed how the team approached incident response — capturing more information, such as logging cryptocurrency addresses, to preserve future traceability.

The environment our biology evolved for — natural light, the day–night cycle, the Earth's fields — has been quietly replaced by an artificial one, with downstream effects on everything from energy and immunity to focus and resilience. It's a blindspot hiding in plain sight: almost no one, clinical or institutional, is examining how the modern electromagnetic environment shapes the biology beneath both health and cognition.

Founded REGENERINT and built the research-and-advisory practice from zero, applying intelligence tradecraft to an emerging scientific domain. The work runs on two tracks: institutional advisory — how the light and electromagnetic environment shapes the cognitive performance, resilience, and readiness of the people who operate within it — and one-on-one coaching for individuals optimizing performance or recovering from complex chronic illness, with particular depth in Lyme disease and tick-borne illness. Board-certified in applied quantum biology.

The same tradecraft applied to a new domain: first-principles analysis of peer-reviewed research, structured through an evidence-tiered framework that grades every claim by the strength of its support, and staying well read on the latest advances in circadian and quantum biology — translating the physics of biology into decision-ready, actionable intelligence.

Briefed university department heads at Utah State University and the Center for Anticipatory Intelligence on the electromagnetic environmental variables affecting cognitive resilience and cognitive security; authored a comprehensive guide on circadian biology, photobiology, and mitochondrial bioenergetics; helped numerous individuals achieve measurable gains in energy, sleep, focus, and recovery; and delivered numerous talks that weave in a passion for regenerative agriculture, bringing this education to local communities.