I came to this work from inside the institutions that families hire me to navigate. As an undergraduate admissions officer at Duke University, I read applications and sat in the committee rooms where decisions are made. As a Duke professor, I taught the students those decisions produced. My own education runs through Brown University, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and Duke, where I earned my doctorate.

Since 2020, I have brought that experience to a private practice serving families across the United States. The approach reflects the training: rigorous, evidence-based, and unhurried. I still sit the SAT three times each year — and score a perfect 1600 each time — because an advisor should practice the discipline he teaches. Away from this work, I write architectural history; my two volumes on the buildings of Aberdeenshire were published by Yale University Press.