the research started at MIT's affective computing group — building multimodal ML systems to help medical students at cornell reflect on their emotional states during patient interactions, particularly with patients dealing with substance use and mental health.

my mom has struggled with substances for years. the research was not abstract to me.

we spun it out, secured NSF funding, acquired the first enterprise customer in six months, and deployed at weill cornell. eventually the co-founder relationship ended — a hard call, made intentionally. the work lives on in the published research and in everything i've built since.