I grew up in Salado, Texas, in a family of Aggie accountants. I assumed I’d follow that path — until a high-school math teacher pointed me toward engineering instead. At Texas A&M I studied biomedical engineering, drawn to the idea that the body is a machine you can understand: stress, strain, and how a structure is built to move.
That fascination became a calling when my senior capstone matched me with a surgeon who operates on babies before birth. We designed a device to seal the tiny opening left behind after that keyhole surgery — and something clicked: the least-destructive path to a fix wasn’t a compromise, it was the goal.
I earned my MD at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston and was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha honor society. I trained in orthopaedic surgery at Memorial Hermann in the Texas Medical Center — one of the country’s busiest Level I trauma centers — long days, the hardest moments of people’s lives, and the kind of volume that teaches you to stay calm and decide well.
Spine surgery drew me in because it had everything: fine technical work, real engineering, and the chance to take someone who is miserable and give them their life back. I chose Vanderbilt for my fellowship specifically to learn endoscopic and minimally invasive technique — and motion preservation — from surgeons who had rebuilt how they operate around doing less harm.
Coming home to the Brazos Valley was the plan all along. The goal is simple: bring this advanced, motion-preserving care close to home, so my neighbors don’t have to potentially travel to Houston or Austin for advanced techniques — and, in time, to help teach the next generation of Aggie engineers and physicians.
