While I would love to be able to support myself through climbing and other active pursuits, in the meantime, I have to find ways to support myself, pay for cool trips, and eat nice meals.

I am currently Head of Research at Etho Capital a teeny company whose mission is to build the world’s best investment strategies by simultaneously providing superior environmental, social, and financial performance. The ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Investing space is the discussion du jour in the investment world. It even took centre stage in the coverage of Davos 2020. The danger is any fund can call themselves an ESG one with the bare minimum level of discernment. I focus on developing and implementing our methodologies for selecting our portfolio of companies.

My career path has been highly unconventional. I was always pretty decent at quite a few academic subjects, but I don’t think I was preternaturally gifted at any one thing. I flailed about in university initially, trying different things in an attempt to find my calling. At the start of my 3rd year, I became quite enamoured with heat-transfer (as one does) and proceeded to take many graduate-level courses in the topic, particularly heat-transfer on the micro-scale. My graduate school research was focused on heat and water-management on the cathode side of a PEM fuel-cell.

For various reasons, I dropped out of that PhD program. I have mixed feelings about that decision. I did some consulting work, travelled a lot (months in Australia, New Zealand, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, etc.), before arriving at Google, Inc. My work there was focused on siting Google’s datacenters and procuring energy for them/their servers. The work brought me to South America and all over the West/Southwest and Rockies in the U.S. But, my heart lay in all my non-work pursuits, namely climbing and skiing.

I was working at Google when my accident happened. The company was extremely supportive during this period of my life. I am fortunate in that I did not have to worry about losing my job while I had to take off so much time to recover.

For reasons I give in my My Story – Not So Brief page, I decided to quit my job, volunteer in Guatemala for a bit and learn some Spanish, before embarking on a pre-med program at Harvard University. Along the way, I decided that med school was not the path for me; subsequently, I devoted myself to climbing training for 2014 Paraclimbing Nationals and the 2014 IFSC World Paraclimbing Championships. Upon my return from Spain, I approached Synapse Energy Economics because of their strong reputation for energy/electricity consulting work for various public and private entities.

Here is my official photo for work. You guys can all crack up now.