COACHING FOR ACADEMICS
You've built a career on rigor. Now build one on presence.
One-to-one coaching for faculty, physician-scientists, and researchers navigating leadership, tenure, funding and the question of what comes next — from someone who has lived every stage of that path.
Who I work with
Tenure-track faculty
You're producing at a high level, but the cost is rising. We work on sustaining performance without burning down the rest of your life — and on leading your lab, not just running it.
Specialist faculty
You hold a clinical service, a teaching load, and a research program at once, and each one assumes it's your priority. I spent years as a boarded surgeon on faculty. We work on where your attention actually goes, and what you're going to stop doing.
Academics at a crossroads
Considering leadership, industry, a startup, or leaving altogether. I've made that transition myself — from Associate Chair to full time father— and I know what the decision actually involves.
How I work
My coaching is grounded in the Presence-Based Coaching approach: the premise that lasting change doesn't come from better time management or another productivity system, but from noticing the habits of attention and reaction that run underneath your work — and building the capacity to choose differently. Academics are trained to live in analysis. That training is an asset, and it has a shadow: it can keep you circling a problem intellectually while the real constraint sits somewhere else entirely. Our sessions make room for both — sharp strategic thinking and honest attention to what's actually driving the situation.
Sessions are conversational, direct, and confidential. You bring the agenda. I bring twenty years inside academia, a coach's training, and no stake in any answer except the one that's true for you.
What coaching with me is: a structured, sustained working partnership focused on your performance, decisions, and development as a leader and a person.
What it isn't: therapy, consulting, or advice-giving. I won't tell you what to decide. I'll help you see clearly enough that the decision gets easier. I trained in the Presence-Based Coaching framework developed by Doug Silsbee, and draw on it alongside a decade of mentoring graduate students, postdocs, and early career stage faculty.
I spent twenty years inside academic medicine and research — as a board-certified veterinary surgeon, a PhD student, and a tenured Associate Professor at Cornell University, where I ran a federally funded neuroscience lab studying peripheral nerve injury. I know the terrain from the inside: the grant cycles, the tenure clock, the committee load, the strange loneliness of running a lab and, the identity that gets bonded to the work.
I published over seventy peer-reviewed papers, raised over $10 million in federal research funding, and turned a patent into a startup, Renerva, translating nerve-repair technology to patients. Then I left and rebuilt my life in a different way. Alongside the research career ran a quieter thread that led here: two decades of mentoring and coaching and facilitating Cornell's Healer's Art program, where veterinary students learn to talk honestly about the hardest parts of clinical life
That combination is what I offer: Fluency in your world, the perspective of someone who stepped outside it, and a long practice of helping people in it find their footing.
Working together
Introductory call
A free 30-minute conversation. You describe where you are; I describe how I'd work with you. We decide together if it's a good fit. No obligation either way.
Regular sessions
One-hour sessions by video, typically every one to two weeks. Most clients work with me for three to six months; some continue longer through a transition or a big push.
Between sessions
The work happens in your real life, not on the call. You leave each session with something concrete to try, notice, or decide — and we start the next session from what happened.
Fees
Coaching is an investment in the career you've already invested a decade or more building. We discuss fees on the introductory call, and some clients fund coaching through professional development budgets. Get in touch to start the conversation.
Start the conversation
The first step is a free 30-minute introductory call. Tell me a little about where you are and what's prompting you to look at coaching now, and I'll come back to you within two working days.
All enquiries are confidential. Sessions run by video and are scheduled to work across US time zones.