In 2013, I left the energy efficiency and sales/marketing world behind after 20+ years of success to focus on teaching, building my music career, and advancing my education. I am a blues rock recording artist, and teach several courses in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of New Haven. I am also completing development of three new courses, one of which is unrelated to music - Emotional and Social Intelligence. I completed my second masters degree at Teachers College, Columbia University in December 2021, and will take some time to focus on my research and career expansion. My latest news is that I'm writing a book! It will be a self-help and motivational book for adolescents and young adults, as well as for educators and parents. It is partly a biography chronicling my own experiences with child abuse and trauma, and how I overcame them. The working title is "Impossible Possibilities: An Educational Journey to Healing, Emotional Intelligence, and Transformation." Feel free to message me if you are interested in knowing more, or contributing to my research, especially if you have a history with abuse and/or trauma.I am committed to social justice, to the development of student-centered and experiential learning curriculum and to creative environments that are motivational and serve diverse student communities. In my music courses, I fuse music instruction with psychology to bring out the voices of students afflicted with social and/or performance anxiety. My research interests are in reducing college dropout, especially amongst marginalized populations, as well as in the link between overuse of technology and increased social anxiety in adolescents and young adults.I am a classically-trained artist from Connecticut whose background in music covers musical theater, live performance, recording, engineering, producing, songwriting and many aspects of the music business, including marketing and promotion. I have had the privilege to be teaching for the past 24 years and have learned a great deal from my students. Every day brings a new opportunity for growth.