For fifteen years I've worked at the intersection of process engineering, behavioral research, and enterprise software adoption. The intersection isn't an accident. The work I find most interesting — and the work organizations seem most willing to pay for — happens at the seams between those disciplines, not inside any one of them.
I came to it sideways. My doctorate is in Engineering Science, with concentrations in Industrial Engineering, Human Factors, and Ergonomics, completed at Southern Illinois University Carbondale on a dissertation analyzing surgical motion through complexity theory. That work — applying nonlinear dynamics to clinician movement — turned into a research program on motion-based assessment of clinical training that has since attracted nearly $1M in funding from the NSF, the Department of Energy, the American Heart Association, and industry partners. Twenty-plus peer-reviewed publications. Three-hundred-plus citations. A research lab at Gannon University.
From the laboratory to the loading dock
By the late 2010s I was running a graduate research program in industrial engineering and consulting on the side, mostly for healthcare and manufacturing clients through Neat Circle, the boutique research firm I co-founded in 2012. The consulting work was always about the same thing the academic work was about — how do humans actually use systems, and what happens when they don't — but in industry contexts where the deliverable was a decision, not a paper.
In 2022, AWS asked me to come do enterprise UX research inside their Fintech R&D organization. I said yes. For three and a half years I led discovery, requirements gathering, and adoption work across more than twenty product teams supporting financial workflow tools at AWS scale — fifty-thousand-seat panels, telemetry dashboards, ResearchOps standing up from scratch, market trends reports going to senior leadership. The work informed roadmap decisions on platforms touching billions in transaction volume. It was the most rewarding non-academic role of my career.
The throughline
What surgical ergonomics, AWS Fintech research, and ERP adoption work all share is a single underlying question: how do you design a human-system interaction that survives contact with reality? That question is dressed differently in each domain. In an operating room it's about cognitive load and tool placement. In a financial workflow tool it's about discovery, fit-gap analysis, and templated research at scale. On an S/4HANA migration it's about change enablement and process redesign. The vocabulary differs. The discipline is the same.
The throughline across my work is the same: how do we design systems, processes, and rollouts that humans will actually adopt at enterprise scale?
Current focus
Current focus
As of 2026, my practice operates across three active lanes — senior UX research advisory for healthcare technology, fintech, and frontier AI product organizations; medical device usability and FDA Human Factors Engineering submission support for device manufacturers and clinical software vendors; and adoption-side advisory work on SAP S/4HANA Cloud migration programs (where I'm pursuing the SAP Certified Implementation Consultant credential for Financial Accounting, C_S4CFI). The lanes share a single underlying skill — designing systems people actually adopt — applied to different organizational contexts.
The advisory work runs through Neat Circle LLC, the boutique research consultancy I co-founded in 2012 and reactivated as a full practice vehicle in 2026 after my AWS Fintech tenure. In parallel I continue at Gannon University as Full Professor in the Biomedical, Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, and as Program Director of the Industrial & Robotics Engineering program — and continue to publish research in healthcare human factors. Both remain core to who I am professionally; neither is going anywhere.
How I work
The honest answer: I take on a small number of engagements at a time, prefer projects with substantive complexity over ones with high volume, and write extensively about what I'm working on. I find that the consulting practice and the academic practice make each other better — the field work surfaces questions that become research, and the research gives me language to be useful in the field. The combination is the point, not a compromise.
If your organization is building or scaling a research function, navigating an ERP migration, preparing an FDA HFE submission, or wrestling with adoption challenges in a regulated environment, I'd value a conversation. I'm based in Erie, Pennsylvania, work remotely, and travel as engagements require.