I build infrastructure that converts data to decisions.

I'm an MD and Assistant Professor of Biology at a Hispanic-Serving community college in Chicago, where I teach anatomy & physiology and microbiology. I also teach Advanced Pathophysiology to nurse practitioner students at Chamberlain University. The premise behind all of it is simple: every system works a certain way, where does it break, and what do you do about it. I apply it to everything.

That reasoning pattern started before I had a name for it. As an undergraduate I was tracing aromatase-immunoreactive cells in snake forebrains — mapping normal neuroendocrine function, finding where seasonal variation disrupted it, testing what explained the change. In a neuroscience lab at Rosalind Franklin, I was measuring neprilysin expression across Alzheimer's disease stages — normal brain, progressive degradation, potential intervention target. At Hines VA, I was tracing dendritic plasticity before and after Nogo-A blockade. At UIC rheumatology, I published on vitamin D metabolism in a pregnant sarcoidosis patient — normal physiology, pathological disruption, clinical management.

Every domain was different. The reasoning was the same. I just didn't have the language for it yet.

I named it Normal → Broken → Fix when I started teaching. A patient presents. You establish normal function. You identify the failure. You intervene. It's diagnostic reasoning. But the scaffold doesn't belong to medicine. It belongs to any system with normal function, failure modes, and corrective actions. A student learning outcome works the same way. An institutional assessment cycle works the same way. A community's food security works the same way.

The assessment engine

I built a self-constructing assessment architecture for our honors program because the instrument we needed didn't exist. I searched the literature systematically. No community college honors program had published a shared rubric for interdisciplinary synthesis. No HSI community college honors program had published any assessment framework at all. So I built one.

Faculty answer three questions about what they already teach. The system derives a consultant identity — a professional role embodying the discipline's way of seeing. It constructs rubric criteria. It pairs disciplines by complementary blind spots. One student artifact, scored once, generates evidence for six reporting purposes simultaneously: honors assessment, program-level outcomes, Phi Theta Kappa, institutional Forms 1–3B, program review, and HLC compliance. No faculty member fills out a form. No administrator requests a report that doesn't already exist.

Components 3 and 4 of that rubric — Discipline Limits and Other Fields to Engage — are Normal→Broken→Fix in assessment language. What does your lens see? What can't it see? Where do you reach next? The scaffold is the same whether the system is a body, an institution, or a democracy.

The instructional architecture

The classroom system is IRB-approved and running a scholarship of teaching and learning study at a Hispanic-Serving Institution.

See the architecture working: Dental clinic demo · Education pilot (real data)

It's a closed-loop architecture: HAPS outcome-mapped materials, dual-layer evidence targeting, metacognitive calibration via NC probes, and the N→B→F scaffold running through every session. Students don't know they're being prepared for exams. They think they're learning to reason about systems. They're doing both.

The civic platform

I built CommUnity OS — a free, bilingual civic infrastructure platform. 50+ pages. 8 federal data APIs by zip code. Dispute letters with state-specific legal citations. Community governance tools. Health monitoring with zero hardware. $7/year to operate. Any community can fork it.

I proposed connecting it to the college's existing food security infrastructure — a complete soil-to-shelf pipeline linking the Sustainable Urban Horticulture program (96% course success, $0 institutional cost) with FeedYours, a free offline food security app with 8 cuisine profiles and full bilingual support. The proposal was data-driven: 155,000 agricultural workers lost, food insecurity at 13.7% nationally and higher for exactly the communities CCC serves, pantry visits up 48% in Chicago. It went to the chancellor's office. It was ignored.

So I took it further. The same components that power the civic platform — the federation protocol, the Bayesian scoring, the dispute letter engine, the multilingual content system, the compliance framework — recombine into solutions for healthcare, education, legal aid, agriculture, economic development, and governance contexts worldwide. That's what NinoTech is.

What NinoTech is

Not 12 platforms. 74 atomic components that recombine into whatever you need — extended by 72 curated open source projects from the global civic tech ecosystem. NinoTech provides the substantial base. Open source fills domain-specific gaps where someone else has already solved a narrow problem well. No reinventing wheels. No vendor lock-in. The scaffold is mine. The ecosystem is everyone's. Built on static HTML, Google Sheets, and Cloudflare Workers. Operating cost: $7 a year. No servers. No subscriptions. No vendor lock-in. You own your data and your code. The commercial work funds the civic work.

I built this because I could not find what my institution, my students, and my community needed. Not because I wanted to build something novel — because the students were arriving and the instruments did not exist. The constraints at a community college — contingent faculty, zero budget, minimal release time — are not limitations. They are the design requirements. Every component in this library was built to work under those conditions. That's why they work everywhere.