Hi, I'm Michael

I lead data operations at the Child Poverty Action Lab, a backbone organization for nonprofits across North Texas. CPAL focuses on the things that move the needle on child poverty in Dallas: public safety, maternal health, benefits delivery, housing, and criminal justice. As Director, Data Operations, I run the data engineering team, our data platform (Databricks, AI-enabled workflows), and the internal tools that put data in front of non-technical staff and partner orgs.

It took a few detours to get here. My first real job was coordinating a child development lab at UT Dallas, and the part that stuck with me wasn't the research itself, it was sitting with the parents of our young participants and trying to explain what we'd found. The gap between how researchers talk to each other and how findings actually reach the people who can do something with them turned out to be the thread of my career. It pulled me through a policy internship at Children at Risk, an MPP at UT Dallas, and into CPAL in 2020.

Two convictions sit underneath the work. First: public data is only useful when the people closest to a problem can act on it, and most of the data that could help families is still locked up in formats and systems that field-team workers, community organizations, and decision-makers can't reach. Second: nonprofits deserve the same data infrastructure as the institutions and markets they're often working against. Most of what I do, at CPAL and outside of it, is in service of those two ideas.