I was sixteen the first time I understood that DNA is a language. Not a metaphor — an actual code. Four letters that spell out how a body builds itself, fuels itself, fights inflammation, processes caffeine, holds onto weight, recovers from stress. Once you see it that way, you can’t unsee it.
That conviction shaped everything that followed. I studied biology in college, then earned my M.S. in Biotechnology at Johns Hopkins. When the Human Genome Project announced its first working draft in 2000, I knew we’d crossed a threshold. The code was readable. What remained was figuring out what to do with it.
For the next two decades, I taught the foundations of biology and genetics — high school, college, and pre-college students, thousands of them. I leaned hard on the science of how people actually learn and change: the brain-based methods that make complex ideas stick and turn knowledge into new habits. That craft turned out to be just as important as the genetics itself.
Then it got personal.
A few years ago, my daughter was navigating some confounding medical issues — the kind that send you down internet rabbit holes at midnight. We decided to sequence her genome through one of the consumer testing companies. It was startlingly affordable. The raw data was extraordinary.
And the report we got back was nearly useless.
Hundreds of pages of variants. Risk percentages without context. Recommendations that contradicted each other. Pages of “your gene says this” with no translation into “so here’s what to actually do on Monday morning.” I’m a biotech-trained science teacher with a graduate degree in this exact field — and even I had to sit down and untangle it.
I looked at that report and thought: most people have no chance of making sense of this.
That was the moment GeneWise stopped being a long-running idea and started becoming a plan. The science had finally arrived: sequencing is cheap, SNP research is mature enough to make evidence-based calls about nutrition, fitness, hormones, sleep, and stress, and targeted DNA therapies are already working in cancer and rare disease.
But the layer that turns data into action — that was missing.
That’s what I’d been training to do for twenty years without knowing it. Genetics expertise, the teaching craft to make complex things land in a real person’s life, and the behavioral-science chops to help those changes actually take root.
That’s why I built GeneWise.