Highlights
Portfolio
Seeking a Bay Area field-placement host — 2026–27I help teams find their own answers to the questions they’ve been afraid to ask — pairing careful organizational diagnostics with the kind of conversations that actually move things.
PsyD candidate, Positive Organizational Psychology (CGU) · Organizational development, people analytics & occupational health · 14 years clinical background.
An invitation to employers
Host my field placement
I’m looking for an organization that genuinely wants to improve its employees’ experience and build the conditions for well-being — in healthcare, mission-driven tech, higher education, or anywhere that takes that seriously. I’d host a supervised, project-based organizational-development (OD) engagement (about 320 hours) toward my doctorate: you get doctoral-level support on a real people challenge, and I get the field experience that completes my training. A true both/and.
Featured — People Analytics
Psychological safety as a buffer against burnout
Predicting employee retention · four-wave engagement survey · N = 715 · public dataset
At high psychological safety, burnout barely dents retention. At low safety, it drives people out.
The question
Burnout pushes people out the door — but not everyone who’s burned out leaves. What makes the difference? We tested whether psychological safety changes how strongly burnout drives the intention to quit.
What I did
Pooled four waves of an engagement survey (N = 715) into one dataset, built reliable composite measures (psychological safety α = .74, career development α = .90), and ran a hierarchical regression testing burnout, psychological safety, and their interaction on retention — controlling for supervisor support, department, and wave. A logistic model addressed actual flight risk; a department profile located where to intervene first.
What I found
- Psychological safety blunts burnout. The interaction was significant (β = .07, p = .024); among employees high in psychological safety, burnout no longer predicted leaving.
- Resources beat demands. With career development, voice, pay equity, and support in the model, burnout lost significance — turnover tracked resource availability, not demands alone (Conservation of Resources theory).
- Career development was the strongest lever — the best predictor of staying and of flight risk.
- The data named the target: one department, high burnout and low resources, was the clear first place to act.
Why it matters
People don’t leave just because the work is hard. They leave when they don’t feel safe to speak up and can’t see a future worth staying for. When a team feels safe enough to be honest — and can see real room to grow — people stay, even under pressure. So the work isn’t to push harder; it’s to build the conditions where people can thrive: managers who welcome questions and honest missteps, and genuine investment in people’s growth, starting where the strain is greatest.
My role
Led the data cleaning and all quantitative analysis (the regression, moderation, and logistic models above), co-developed the initial hypotheses, and contributed to the literature review and final write-up on a four-person team.
Graduate capstone, CGU PsyD. Public dataset. Grounded in Job Demands–Resources and Conservation of Resources theory.
Doctoral Portfolio — The Missing Ingredient: How Organizations Flourish
Six pieces of work, gathered into four threads — Chemistry, Conversations, Connection, and Courage. Together they ask one question: what helps a team flourish? My throughline is simple — teams are already creative, resourceful, and whole, not problems to be solved. My work is to build the conditions where people can name what matters and grow from there.
Employee Experience Diagnostic & Onboarding Toolkit
A real engagement diagnostic for a large healthcare employer: closing the gap between what new employees expect and what they experience — by building on trusted managers and a new employee resource group program.
De-identified: a large U.S. nonprofit health insurer (public-programs division). Client name, sponsor, and figures withheld under confidentiality; details available on request with permission.
The opportunity
The client’s recent engagement survey surfaced one clear signal: its lowest-scoring item pointed to a gap between what employees expected and what they actually experienced — felt most by newer employees. The same survey revealed a real strength to build on: people trusted their managers.
What I did
Ran a needs assessment across onboarding, belonging, and the employee lifecycle to locate where the expectation–experience gap opened, and identified two assets to build on: trusted managers, and the rollout of a new employee resource group (ERG) program as a ready-made way to welcome and engage new hires. At our sponsor’s request, I helped build a leader-facing onboarding toolkit — structured 30/60/90-day check-ins, belonging touchpoints, and escalation pathways.
The move that matters
Designing the support as conditions around already-stretched managers rather than one more task placed on them — turning the organization’s existing strength (manager trust) and a new ERG program into the vehicles for engaging early-tenure employees.
Observing the Team “Black Box”
We measure what goes into a team and what comes out — but what happens between people stays a black box, and the usual fix, a self-report survey, is biased. This is a tool to score team process from the outside.
The black box
Team effectiveness is measured well at the edges — inputs like skills and composition, outputs like performance. What happens inside the team, the live relational process, is largely a black box. And when we do measure it, we mostly ask members to self-report — the same people rating both the process and the outcome on the same survey, which invites common method bias and social-desirability effects.
The gap
Behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) already exist to rate individual team members (peer evaluation), and, in fields like healthcare and aviation, to score team task performance in simulations. What hasn’t existed is a general, theory-grounded BARS for observing team process — the relational dynamics of consultation — at the team level.
What I built
A process-consultation observation scale: a behaviorally anchored tool a trained observer uses to score team process from the outside, sidestepping common method bias. It’s grounded in Schein’s process consultation, Lambrechts’ relational practice quality, and Weick & Roberts’ heedful interrelating — across four observable dimensions: reciprocal interaction, mutual questioning, humble inquiry & status negotiation, and suspension of judgment.
Methodological rigor
Stress-tested with two independent raters, then mapped where the instrument would fail — missing mid-point anchors that inflate apparent disagreement, construct contamination, and outcome-measure gaps — with a concrete revision roadmap and inter-rater reliability targets. Building the measure, and documenting its failure modes, before claiming it works.
From Toxic to Brave — Conversation Cards
A 60-card facilitation deck that lets a team flip a card — not point a finger — when toxic patterns show up. Try the mechanic:
Hover or tap a card — the card becomes the messenger, not the person.
The idea
A 60-card deck (seven card types) turning culture theory into something a team can physically handle. Double-sided cards show a toxic behavior on one side and a brave alternative on the reverse; teams start toxic-side-up and claim brave behaviors by vote.
Why it works
When a toxic pattern appears, any member flips a card — the card becomes the messenger, not a person pointing a finger. That depersonalizes feedback, builds shared ownership of culture, and grows the muscle of naming and course-correcting in the moment.
Demonstrates
Dialogic OD design, psychological-safety-by-design, and translating academic theory into a portable facilitation tool. In partnership with Dr. Gloria González-Morales.
Lab Culture Assessment + Brave Intervention
A full cycle of organizational work for research labs — measure a competitive, win-at-all-costs lab culture, intervene to shift it, then evaluate the change, with an equity lens.
The problem
STEM research labs concentrate power in the PI and run hot on competition — fertile ground for what Berdahl calls masculinity-contest culture (MCC), linked to lower citizenship behavior and worse well-being.
The design
Pair an MCC-based assessment of a lab’s culture with the Toxic-to-Brave intervention for labs scoring high on toxic power dimensions, then evaluate change — assessment → intervention → evaluation, with an explicit equity lens on who bears the cost of toxic culture.
Demonstrates
The complete OD cycle in one package: diagnose a system, intervene, and check whether it moved.
Off-Sites & Retreats That Work — Evidence Review
Do offsites actually work? An evidence-based review of utility, ROI, and design for hybrid and distributed teams.
The question
Organizations spend heavily on offsites and team-development interventions largely on faith. Do they work, when, and how should they be designed — especially for hybrid and distributed teams?
What I’m doing
Synthesizing the evidence on utility, ROI, and design principles — drawing on recent work like Kneeland’s (2024) study of how offsites rewire organizational networks and Shuffler & Salas on team effectiveness — into a practitioner-facing review a consultant could actually use. Targeting a peer-reviewed consulting-psychology outlet.
Demonstrates
Evidence-based practice, ROI literacy, and thought leadership bridging research and application.
Project-Based Work & Field Placement
An open invitation: I’m looking for a host organization for a supervised, project-based OD engagement — real work on a real people problem, with faculty oversight.
What you’d get
Doctoral-level support on a real people challenge — with a serious statistics toolkit behind it. I clean and make sense of messy survey data, run the models that separate signal from noise (multilevel and moderated regression, mediation, and survey psychometrics), and turn the results into a decision you can act on. Plus engagement diagnostics, team facilitation, or a manager and onboarding toolkit — scoped as a clear project, under faculty supervision (about 320 hours).
What I’d get
The supervised field experience that completes my PsyD — a low-risk way for you to bring in high-caliber project work.
References & recommendations
Available upon request.