Founder’s Story

Treasure Coast Cognition didn't begin with clinical training or research experience. It began in a workshop in Key Largo with the person who taught me to love science.

The Story

I grew up spending holidays at my grandparents' house in Key Largo fishing and in the small workshop my grandfather built after he retired from flying for Eastern Airlines. He had been a WWII pilot — quiet, precise, methodical — and when he stopped flying, he invented. That workshop was where I learned the practice of science, that circuits could be built as connectors, that problems could be solved.

And then he slowly disappeared from the world he built and the time he spent with me.

The bike rides stopped. The teaching moments faded. His quietness became distance. By the time anyone knew something was wrong, the person I loved was already gone in the ways that mattered most — not his body, but his mind, his ability to be willfully grumpy and to remember the things he'd built like his Coors beer can airplanes.

After he died, I stood in that workshop where he spent hours surrounded by his tools and prototypes, his beer can airplanes hanging from the ceiling, and lottery tickets stapled to the walls. Everything was still. His workshop was still here, but he was gone.

That moment stayed with me. It led me into neuroscience — two decades of research at Harvard, UAB, and the NIH, studying how cognition changes over time. I learned how to measure decline, how to detect it earlier, and how to build personalized prevention programs designed to give families as many meaningful minutes together as possible.

But I also learned that knowing earlier isn't enough.

Families would come to me after years of subtle changes — a missed appointment, a forgotten conversation, a decision that didn't make sense. By the time they arrived, we were clarifying what the diagnosis meant too late.

I founded Treasure Coast Cognition to change that timeline.

If we start early — if we monitor, coordinate, and protect cognition upstream — families stay intact. People remain capable. Transitions happen with dignity instead of crisis.

This work began in a workshop in Key Largo. It continues now, one family at a time, with the families who refuse to wait until it's too late.