An engineer who learned resilience the hard way, and now teaches it.

What does it take to be relentless about your own life? Usually, it takes losing something.

I grew up in Augusta, Georgia, and I was the kid who did everything right — valedictorian, Morehouse and Georgia Tech on scholarship, a PhD in mechanical engineering, a career that took me from engineer to chief technology officer. On paper, the plan worked.

Then my wife, Lorie, died of cancer, and the plan stopped mattering.

Loss confines a lot of people permanently to the shadows. I know, because I lived there for a while. What I want people to hear is that there is a road back — not a road around, a road back — and that the person who walks it returns different. I am a better father, a better friend, and a more empathetic human being than I was before. I would not have chosen the tuition. I will not waste the education.

Tears are the sweat required to soften our hearts to the strength we didn't know we had.

What I do now

By day I am the chief technology officer at ScanTech AI Systems, where my team builds AI detection systems that have to work the first time, every time. I have led algorithm development through TSA certification. I hold a PhD in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech, where I was a NASA Harriet Jenkins Fellow and a Packard Fellow.

By calling I speak — to companies, churches, colleges and nonprofits — about resilience, reinvention, and the unglamorous work of starting over.

The running thing

I have run seven marathons. On October 11 I will finish my eighth, in Chicago.

Every runner knows that the race is not decided at the start line, where everyone is fresh and the crowd is loud. It is decided around mile 18, when the body has run out of easy and the only thing left is what you decided in advance. That is the whole talk, really.