About

About Me

I’m not a developer. I’m not a pure academic. I’m a psychologist who builds products — and the gap between those worlds is where the interesting problems live.

I’ve always felt more like a builder than a theorist. Twenty years between academic research and co-founding companies that put psychometric science into production systems. The same methods that make a study rigorous make a product decision defensible. The through-line is measurement: if you can’t quantify it rigorously, you can’t build on it.

Academic Career

I’ve been an adjunct at SWPS University’s Department of Psychological Research Methodology since 2006. I teach methodology, psychometrics, data analysis, and R programming — the courses where students learn that their intuitions need evidence behind them.

I directed the Experimental Psychology Laboratory from 2010 to 2024. My PhD in Psychology (Cognitive Science, SWPS, 2024) focused on the cognitive accessibility of observable and unobservable properties in thinking about self and others. Before that, postgraduate work in Advanced Statistical Methods at the London School of Economics (2018) gave me multilevel modeling, latent class analysis, and structural equation modeling — tools I use in both research and product work.

Research

My research sits at the intersection of cognitive accessibility, self-concept formation, and intergroup behavior. I study how people construct mental representations of themselves and others, what makes certain properties cognitively accessible, and how that accessibility shapes judgment. Adjacent lines of work cover collective narcissism, revenge motivation, and moral emotions.

Published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Self and Identity, PLoS ONE, Aggressive Behavior, Personality and Individual Differences, and Journal of Social Psychology, among others. Research funded by NCN (Maestro, OPUS) and NCBR grants. I treat negative results as data, not failures — they narrow the hypothesis space.

Building Products

Cognitive science is not a metaphor I apply to product work. It is the work. My work always starts with questions: What’s really going on? Why does this problem exist? Then I translate insights into experiments, products, and strategies that actually work — bridging data, psychology, and design.

At Gyfted / Human Exponent, I lead psychometrics and product — designing assessments that make hiring and career growth more fair, data-driven, and human. At Nerds.family, I develop the Academy 360 model — connecting companies, mentors, and learners through hands-on academies that grow talent pipelines. At Digital Savages / SEO Savages, I build programmatic and AI-driven SEO systems that help startups grow fast and communicate what makes them stand out.

The thread across all of them: measurement matters, and the gap between “we think this works” and “we measured that this works” is where most products fail.

How I Work

Systems first. Evidence always. Then build.

I use AI as a technical co-founder. Not a coding assistant — a thinking partner for architecture decisions, specification writing, code review, and product strategy. I’m not a developer. I think in systems, data, and methodology, then use spec-driven development to translate that thinking into implementation. Heavy front-loading before any code gets written.

Everything I build is treated as an experiment with a clear hypothesis and a way to validate it. This site itself is part of that workflow: a content engine reads my repositories, interprets the work through my professional lens, and produces the posts you see on the blog. Systems that compound.

If any of this maps to a problem you’re working on, get in touch. I’ll tell you honestly whether I can help.