Still learning. Still building. Still can’t sit still.
I’m a veterinary operator, educator, and entrpreneur who has spent my career building things that didn’t exist, fixing things that weren’t working, and trying to leave every place a little more stable, more functional, and more hopeful than I found it. I care a lot about clarity, accountability, and kindness, and I try to keep students, animals, and the people doing the work at the center of every decision.
I graduated from Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine in 2001 and spent more than 15 years as a true 50/50 mixed-animal practitioner in rural Appalachia. I founded Brown Veterinary Service in Wayne, West Virginia, built and expanded the facility, grew a team, added a boarding, grooming, and training center, and ultimately sold the practice after reaching solid annual revenue. Along the way, I also launched Veterinary Livestock Services, a mobile large-animal practice, while serving as an associate veterinarian and hospital administrator at a busy small-animal clinic that cared for thousands of clients.
Those years taught me how thin the margin can be for rural practices and producers, and how much it matters when the last large-animal vet in town disappears. Because that’s exactly what happened after I sold my practice—the large animal service just vanished from the community. That reality changed how I thought about my career.
Over time I found myself asking a different question: not just “How do I care well for the animals in front of me?” but “How do we build systems and teams so more people can do great work for more animals, sustainably?” That question pulled me into education.
I started teaching equine studies, where I got to combine clinical instruction with overseeing actual animal care and launching affordable community clinics that doubled as real-world training for students. Then I founded and led the AVMA-accredited Veterinary Technology Program at Mountwest Community and Technical College—designed the curriculum, secured initial accreditation, and built a simulation-rich, case-driven program that produced practice-ready graduates for a region that badly needed them.
In 2020 I returned to my alma mater to direct Purdue’s Veterinary Nursing Programs—two nationally recognized AVMA-accredited on-campus and distance-learning programs serving hundreds of students and supported by a multimillion-dollar budget. We grew total enrollment substantially, doubled distance-learning participation, and brought a long-probationary distance program back into good standing while maintaining full CVTEA compliance and earning commendations for academic rigor and graduate readiness.
I led curriculum modernization that integrated high-fidelity simulation, progressive online pedagogy, and competency-based education. I co-founded a dual-degree partnership with Huntington University. I chaired the Purdue Undergraduate Curriculum Council. And I taught a broad portfolio of courses—from clinical skills, anesthesia, and clinical pathology to management, disaster response, and life-skills courses—while advising dozens of DVM and veterinary nursing students.
The work wasn’t just administrative. I was in classrooms, mentoring students, redesigning courses, and constantly asking “Is this actually preparing people for the realities of practice?”
Today, I serve as Executive Director of Hospital Operations and Clinical Associate Professor at Iowa State University’s Lloyd Veterinary Medical Center, a large, multi-specialty academic hospital serving companion, equine, and production animal patients. My job is to keep the hospital clinically excellent, financially healthy, operationally sane, and an outstanding teaching environment.
That includes leading hospital-wide biosecurity modernization, restructuring the Infectious Disease Control Committee, updating quarantine and exposure protocols, and preparing for external infectious-disease audits. It also means managing budgeting, forecasting, pricing strategies, and accounts receivable; deploying enterprise-wide dashboards and KPIs; and standardizing billing and collections across more than 20 service lines to support strategic planning, growth, and sustainability.
I helped launch and now serve as executive liaison to the LVMC Advisory Board, and I sit on the college’s executive cabinet, contributing to strategic planning, accreditation efforts, space planning, and faculty recruitment.
Across these roles, I’ve developed an unusual blend of hospital-CEO mindset and academic understanding. I’m comfortable talking about caseload, throughput, and margin in the morning, then shifting to curriculum outcomes, accreditation standards, student wellbeing, and faculty promotion and tenure in the afternoon. I’ve taken an accredited program off probation, navigated evolving expectations around distance education and clinical resources, and I tend to treat compliance not as box-checking but as good education and good operations made visible.
Outside the traditional lane of veterinary medicine, I founded and ran MT Global Ecommerce, a multi-platform e-commerce company leveraging sites like eBay and Amazon, which sharpened my instincts for customer experience, logistics, and data-driven decision-making. That entrepreneurial streak shows up in how I approach academic and hospital work: test ideas, measure what matters, iterate, and keep the mission front and center.
Nationally, I’ve been active in shaping the future of veterinary team education. I served on the AAVMC Competency-Based Veterinary Education Nursing Working Group that developed the CBVE-N model, and I’ve chaired or helped found multiple task forces focused on residential and online veterinary nursing programs and team-based veterinary healthcare.
I’ve delivered numerous regional and national talks on topics such as distance education in veterinary nursing, utilization of veterinary technicians, rural practice models, and clinical content for veterinary technicians, as well as university and professional-meeting presentations on leadership and clinical education. I’ve also been PI or key personnel on multiple instructional grants supporting online course and program development.
I stay engaged with the profession through service on state and national boards and committees—ranging from state veterinary medical association boards to institutional committees like IACUC, diversity action groups, advisory boards, and strategic governance councils. Along the way, I’ve completed leadership and mediation training, been inducted into the Omicron Chapter of Phi Zeta, and maintained licensure and active involvement in multiple state and national veterinary associations.
If you’re looking for a through-line, it’s this: I gravitate toward complex, under-pressure systems—rural practices, new academic programs, large online curricula, big teaching hospitals—and I enjoy helping steady them, clarify the path forward, and then grow in a way that’s actually sustainable for the people doing the work.
My leadership style is straightforward and relational: I listen hard, I ask “What’s working, what’s broken, and what do you need from me?”, and then I try very hard to do what I said I would do. I give credit widely and take blame narrowly, and I believe you can set very high expectations while still being approachable, a bit witty, and genuinely kind.
I’m married with two daughters—one finishing up a finance degree, the other in nursing school. I ride a Harley, play golf with more enthusiasm than skill, and maintain deep roots in Appalachia even though I’m currently living in Iowa. My communication style is direct and conversational because I grew up in a place where people say what they mean and mean what they say.
Some days I nail it. Some days I don’t. But I keep showing up, learning from what didn’t work, and trying to get better.