From Money to Meaning

I am both a researcher and a practitioner, and the two halves feed each other: research gives my practice its rigor; practice gives my research its questions. My path here is more continuous than it looks. I spent the first decade of my career as an academic scientist studying human relationships — how people connect, communicate, and grow close or apart — directing a university research lab, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, and learning to measure the things people feel but struggle to say.

My work extends that science to a relationship nearly everyone has and almost no one examines: our relationship with money. As a researcher, I have studied it at every scale — controlled experiments on how framing shapes financial decisions, large national surveys on retirement preparation, and Northern Trust's first quantitative study of how ultra-high-net-worth individuals think, feel, and decide about wealth, conducted through a behavioral science practice I built there from the ground up.

A growing focus of my work is existential psychology — the study of how people find meaning, purpose, and direction in their lives. For rising generations of wealth, the central struggle is rarely a lack of options; it is an abundance of them, untethered from a sense of what they're for. I have been weaving this lens into my client conversations: helping people examine their values, confront the fears and frictions that keep them stuck, and find a meaningful path through a sea of possibilities. Increasingly, it is the heart of how I think about this work — because wealth questions are meaning questions in disguise.

The research travels. My work on retirement preparation has been presented to the U.S. Department of Labor's ERISA Advisory Council, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office sought me out to consult on the design of a national survey of Generation Z's retirement readiness. I have partnered with the Wharton School, the Aspen Institute, and the Family Office Exchange; published 18 peer-reviewed journal articles, with more than two dozen total publications spanning academic journals, edited handbooks, industry papers, and white papers; and received the 2023 Investment & Wealth Institute Governance Insight Award.

It is relationship science, applied to wealth — studied with the rigor of the lab, practiced in the rooms where families make their most consequential decisions. The question underneath both is the same: what is really driving the behavior here, and what does that mean for how we decide and act?