My life is a patchwork of experiences that helped shape and enable my career as an entrepreneur and leader. I was born in Carrizo Springs, a small southwest Texas town, until my father’s job with the state department took us all over the world — Amman, Guatemala City, San Jose, and stops along the way in Israel, Syria, Egypt, Cyprus, Spain, France, Germany, Honduras, El Salvador, and Panama. Living overseas gave me a worldly outlook, a degree of humility, and a great deal of confidence: I learned to identify risk and opportunity after spending so much time in third-world countries. It was also in the streets and alleys of Jerusalem, haggling with vendors over trinkets and wares, that I first got hooked on the thrill of the deal.
I came home to Texas in 1991 and received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Rice University in 1996. I turned down a sales job with Shell to build my technical foundation first, spending five years with Rohm and Haas (R&H) as a utilities engineer, unit process engineer, and Start-up Engineer across their Deer Park, Bayport, and Louisville plants. When R&H asked me to help lead a global SAP implementation, I realized the sales bug had never left me, and I returned to Texas to take a sales job with a small process safety company, Berwanger, Inc.
During my two and a half years at Berwanger, I helped grow annual revenue by 70%, negotiating deals worldwide with clients like ExxonMobil, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and Sunoco. In 2004, with two partners, I started Celerity3 Engineering to provide process engineering and process safety solutions to the oil and gas industry. From 2004 to my departure in 2010, Celerity3 grew on the order of 4800%, expanded globally, and was named one of the Houston Business Journal’s Fastest-Growing Houston-Based Companies in 2008 — the same year Lloyd’s Register acquired the company. Staying on through the acquisition gave me a front-row seat to multiple integrations and a role in a billion-dollar, 7,000-person company operating in 240 countries.
By 2010, the integration work was largely done, and I had seen firsthand how a global enterprise absorbs and scales a specialist firm. But my entrepreneurial spirit was calling, and I could no longer meaningfully shape the trajectory of the company I had helped build and sell. So I left Lloyd’s Register and, that same year, started two things at once: Cognascents Consulting Group, Inc. and my MBA at Rice University, which I completed in 2012. The classroom sharpened the vision while the company put it to the test in real time.
That vision was a start-up 2.0, a better answer to what a PSM consultancy should achieve and deliver. Too much of our industry delivers process safety in silos: a strong PHA practice here, a capable audit group there, pockets of excellence that rarely connect. Cognascents was built to deliver a comprehensive tapestry of excellence spanning the full PSM and RMP spectrum, from process hazard analysis and compliance auditing to risk-based inspection, pressure relief engineering, and alarm management. We serve oil and gas, refining, petrochemical, LNG, and specialty chemical operators from our base in Houston. Today we pair that integrated expertise with production-grade agentic AI, always under the oversight of a subject-matter expert, so clients get faster, more traceable work without giving up the human judgment that process safety demands.
As Founder and President, I set the firm’s strategy, serve and support all facets of our operations, and stay close to the technical work, including our AI development and our contributions to the profession through AIChE / CCPS, MKOPSC, and APEGA. What matters most to me sits outside the office: my faith, my wife and our four children, and the conviction that a business is ultimately an act of stewardship and service to others.