I’m from a little town on the northern coast of Puerto Rico. This is still home, where my mom, brother, and dog live, and I always yearn to return. I never feel completely at home if I’m far from the ocean and the sun, except in Bologna, where I spent a very happy year as a graduate student in my twenties.

My first and enduring intellectual love was and remains understanding “the rest of the world.” Maybe because I grew up in a small town in a small island and couldn’t travel much as a kid, I was always fascinated by other places and felt a need to leave (temporarily), to see and understand as much of the world as possible. I still don’t do well with the idea of staying put in the same place indefinitely, so I left my job to travel for a while and learn things I didn't learn in formal schooling.

I studied international relations, economics, and development at Penn and at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and finance via the CFA program. I speak Spanish, English, and semi-functional Italian (I minored in Chinese language and history but have since forgotten most of the language — though not the history).

Until now, I’ve been a consultant, an emerging markets private equity investor, and a risk management expert in a few settings (an exchange and a global bank, focused on digital assets and artificial intelligence governance). While I learned a lot from each of those roles, I’m not yet sure what my career “noun” is or should be (partly why I'm taking an exploratory year off).

I measure success and life satisfaction primarily by how much I get to:

• explore new countries/places;
• learn things from interesting books, work, people, experiences;
• contribute to something useful to the world, to solving problem(s) that matter for real people; and
• (most importantly) spend time (especially outdoors) with Sage and my favorite humans.

This sabbatical is an attempt to reorient my life around those things, and figure out what I’m meant to be doing with the precious little time we’re gifted on this planet.