My career has never fit particularly neatly into one corner of psychology.

Early in my training, I was drawn to work that crossed traditional boundaries—psychology and law, healthcare and behavior, research and clinical practice. I trained and worked in settings ranging from the juvenile justice system to academic medicine, eventually building a career that included clinical care, psychological assessment, research, teaching, program development, leadership, and consultation.

For a long time, those experiences could look like separate professional paths. Increasingly, I came to see the connections between them.

Much of my graduate research and early clinical work focused on children and families. In pediatric settings at Hennepin Healthcare and Mayo Clinic, I worked extensively with children while also working with adults—and, inevitably, spent a great deal of time working with parents. I found myself particularly drawn to my work with mothers: understanding their experiences, helping them navigate complicated systems and competing demands, and supporting the well-being of the person who was so often focused on everyone else's.

Over time, that interest helped shape a broader transition toward working with women. Becoming a mother myself added another dimension to how I understood the intersections of identity, health, caregiving, relationships, and professional life. My clinical and professional interests increasingly followed those intersections.

Working in healthcare reinforced that psychological well-being can't be separated from what is happening in the body, family, or larger healthcare system. Research and teaching strengthened my commitment to evidence while also teaching me that evidence is only useful when it can be translated into the complexity of real people's lives. Leadership and organizational work made clear how much our environments shape how we function—and how often difficulties attributed to an individual are also influenced by the systems around them.

That evolution eventually brought greater focus to women's health across the lifespan, including pregnancy and postpartum, reproductive mental health, PMDD, and perimenopause and menopause. At the same time, my work in ADHD, autism, and executive functioning increasingly highlighted how often neurodivergence in women had been missed, misunderstood, or recognized only after the demands of life changed.

Again and again, I encountered highly capable women trying to understand why something that had once seemed manageable no longer was. Their experiences rarely fit neatly into a single box.

AJR & Co. grew from wanting a professional home where those connections didn't have to be separated.

Today, that means I can move between the therapy room, psychological assessment, executive coaching, professional education, and organizational consultation while drawing from the same foundation: psychological science, curiosity about the whole person and the systems around them, and a belief that good psychological work should ultimately be useful in the life someone is actually living.