Hi, thanks for dropping by :)

My journey into academia began at a Vipassana meditation retreat in Thailand, where I discovered a previously unimagined depth to my own mind and resolved to explore consciousness from all angles – through philosophy, meditation, psychology and neuroscience. I returned home to complete an undergraduate degree in psychology and an award-winning honours thesis in cognitive neuroscience, before embarking on a PhD in the neural mechanisms of visual awareness. Partway through the PhD, I attempted to publish my first paper and was shocked to discover a highly inefficient scholarly publishing system that wastes time and resources, biases the literature and pressures researchers into compromising their integrity. I also realised that employment prospects are pretty grim in academia, throwing me into a state of disillusionment – if I carried down this path, would I be forced to compromise my scientific integrity to survive in academia? Did I really want to compete with friends and colleagues for too little funding? Was the system even capable of supporting the types of big questions I’m interested in asking? Everywhere I looked, I saw evidence of overworked and burned-out researchers, many of whom had decided to leave academia after years of chasing short-term postdoc contracts around the world.

This disillusionment, coupled with other life stressors at the time, threw me into a deep depression that lasted the latter half of my PhD (incidentally, mental health problems are rife throughout academia). Since graduating, I’ve been rebuilding my mental health and regaining balance, thanks in large part to self-compassion meditation, dancing, and finding hope in the open science movement, which aims to create a fairer system while opening the research pipeline to public scrutiny. Toward the end of my PhD, I joined the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education and founded a collective action platform that aims to help researchers reclaim control of academia and restore balance in the research ecosystem (Project Free Our Knowledge). After spending far too much time coming oh-so-close to winning funding for this project, I realised I could earn more money playing poker and decided to leave academia to self-fund instead. In 2021, I placed in a few good-sized tournaments and came second on the Australian Poker Tour leaderboard, validating my decision to go ‘rogue’.

I’m now devoting all of my spare energy to Open Heart + Mind (OHM), a community-turned charity where we’ve been testing and iterating on an open review model that I designed to disrupt scholarly publishing, before realising I needed a safer space to prototype. At the same time, I discovered the creative potential of Burning Man gatherings, based on gifting and decommodification principles, and realised this could serve as an analogue for academia and a safe space to prototype the types of radical models I was dreaming up. This work has brought new challenges, not least of all learning to become a leader and manage a community as a born-introvert and recovering perfectionist. I’m deeply grateful for the learning opportunities this project allows and for all the amazing humans supporting me on this journey to realise my dreams.

In between this work and playing poker to fund it, I try to maintain a healthy balance through music, gardening, dancing, meditating, rockclimbing and spending time in nature.