I quit my job, we sold our house, and we moved into a tiny apartment next to the University of
North Carolina at Greensboro, where they have a program to help folks who already have
bachelor’s degrees to complete all the pre-requisite classes in a single year. I did well and
worked in a research group exploring antibodies to a rare group of cancers including clear cell
and Ewing’s sarcoma.

I was fortunate to enroll at the University of North Carolina Adams School of Dentistry. During
the summer between the first and second years of school, I went with a group of classmates to
Malawi in southern Africa. While there, a friend remarked about how excited I was to work with
and talk to the children there. A lightbulb went off, and I quickly decided to specialize in pediatic
dentistry.

In dental school, I was class president, I participated in dental research (mostly on osteogenesis
imperfecta), and was inducted into Omicron Kappa Upsilon, the premier dental honor society. I
graduated with honors and distinction. I stayed on at UNC to complete my pediatric dentistry
residency program for three more years of specialty training. When I graduated in 2015, there
were only two pediatric dentists produced in the entire state of North Carolina. The other was
my UNC classmate, Alexandra Boudreau. We decided within just a few months of meeting each other that we wanted to work together.
Dentistry can be a stodgy profession, and we appreciated each other’s approach to children and
a shared sense of humor.

While we were plotting the course to open CPD, I worked as a pediatric dentist in other settings.
I worked for a practice just north of Fort Liberty (or Bragg, depending on when you’re reading
this), where I treated mostly military families. I worked in a rural private practice in Raeford. I
spent three years working one day a week at Duke Children’s Hospital, where I saw medically
interesting patients for dental care under general anesthesia.

Chatham Pediatric Dentistry opened in 2016, and it remains the most important part of my
career. Alex and I have cultivated exactly the environment we’d hoped for. It’s a place where
patients are cared for like family, in a setting where we can take all the time we need to get a
child as comfortable as possible. We’re part of the community we live in, even supporting kids
outside the office through outreach efforts. Since opening, we’ve watched families grow, kids
mature, and even had a few want to come back and shadow us, hoping that they’ll be able to
become dentists some day.

Out of the office, even on my lunch breaks, I like to take pictures of wildlife. My photography
has won awards and been published in field guides. When I’m not laying on my belly on a
deserted dirt road trying to get an eye-to-eye shot of a canebrake rattlesnake, I’m frustrating my
neighbors by loudly playing guitar on my porch out in the woods of Chatham County. My two
children are students in Chatham County Schools, and my wife works roughly eighty hours aweek volunteering in various non-profits to support public education and marginalized
communities in the area.