I am at the end of a 20-year military career in intelligence analysis with extensive experience in analytic design, methodology development, program management, written communication, and inter-agency collaboration. My analytic background guided a long-term personal interest in understanding the interconnected nature of the people, social systems, and structures that comprise the world around me. As I progressed through my career, my thinking evolved to produce more accurate intelligence assessments based in a deeper understanding of the human factors behind the data. I sought experiences and education to understand social, environmental, psychological, and other elements that influence individual decision-making, and ultimately discovered a deep personal and research interest in cognition and analytic thought. I find personal fulfillment in meeting intellectual challenge and leveraging my analytic skillset to engage novel situations, develop new analytic methodologies, and translate my insights into cohesive plans and actions for positive change. While my background is in intelligence analysis, a key element that made intelligence analysis rewarding for me was the prevalence of unknowns. Ambiguous and incomplete data create challenging puzzles that require creative methodologies and approaches to understand for effective policy or planning recommendations. It is analysis involving complexity, ambiguity, and creativity in which I truly excel, and analytic (and research) problems of that nature are hardly limited to the intelligence field.