Chief of Staff, Product & Growth @ InstaLILY AI | Vertical AI Agents | Women in AI | Research @ Columbia ZI | Former-Pro Ballet Dancer

The same question keeps pulling me forward: under constraint, what does a system choose to attend to next, and why? I've been chasing it in different rooms my whole life. Twenty years of classical ballet; Moscow as a teenager, the first Canadian admitted to the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, then professional work in New York. It's a unique education when you spend that long inside a discipline that doesn't grade on intention...and it changes how you think about every system you touch afterward. You learn that precision is not a virtue, it's a precondition; that the gap between almost and exactly is where everything lives; that a body under load tells the truth about every shortcut you took to get there. A millimeter is a missed lift. A tenth of a second is the wrong music. The standard isn't effort, it's whether it held...and elegantly. Cognitive science, computational neuroscience, and decision theory at Columbia and Cambridge let me ask the question more formally. Under Dr. Jacqueline Gottlieb at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, my thesis looked at how the brain models uncertainty and allocates attention during decision-making, one attentional shift at a time. How curiosity guides what people choose to look at next. How framing changes what they notice and what they trust. How memory decides what makes it back into the next decision at all. I also taught it: TA for Thinking and Decision Making at Columbia, walking undergrads, business school, and PhD students through the same machinery from the other side of the room. I didn't leave that research behind. I use it in the way I think about cognitive architecture. At Instalily.ai, our platform decides what an enterprise agent should remember, surface, route, or defer, and where the human belongs in the loop; autonomous AI for the physical economy: the distributors, field crews, dispatch desks, and operators keeping the real world running. I lead growth and AI product research, operations, and our GTM strategy, and serve as Chief of Staff. I also lead our Women in AI initiative; Tech Week gatherings in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, London and more soon, regular sessions in NYC. You build the rooms you want to be in :). If you're rethinking how work should work, let's talk. If you love anything olfaction or memory and neuroscience-related, let's really talk. ΦBK | Columbia | Cambridge | Zuckerman Mind Brain & Behavior Institute