I have sat on both sides of this table — as the operator making the call, and as the researcher asking why it worked.

I am a practitioner-scholar. My career moved from engineering into senior technology leadership at the enterprise level, then into founding and scaling technology ventures, and finally into the classroom. I direct the Family Business Center at California Baptist University’s Dr. Robert K. Jabs School of Business, where I also teach upper-division and graduate business courses, and I direct the Engineering Management program at UC Riverside. That dual appointment is how member companies gain access to supervised graduate project teams across both business and engineering.

At the Center I lead programming, applied research, and the external partnerships that fund and extend the work — with Riverside County, the Inland Empire SBDC, AmPac Business Capital, and the City of Riverside. I designed the FBC’s twelve-category service framework, its Silver/Gold/Platinum membership structure, the AI Readiness Check, and the Legacy Link mentor-matching program, and I host the FBC Podcast with Dr. Smith.

My research and writing sit at the intersection of leadership, family enterprise, and applied AI — including work on management elasticity, quantum-inspired forecasting for small firms, and AI adoption in family-owned businesses. I serve in an advisory role with a second-generation family business in the Coachella Valley and on a regional water board, which keeps the advice honest: it has to work on a Monday morning, not just in a journal.