Portfolio — Technical Staff Editor

This post describes an AI-driven data visualization system built for laboratory environments, combining AWS services with machine learning pipelines. It demonstrates my comfort editing AI/ML subject matter and producing clear prose from technical authors whose primary expertise is not writing.

This post makes a technical argument for an AWS-based approach to remote clinical trial monitoring. The editing challenge was helping the author present a clear, evidence-grounded case for their approach while acknowledging its scope and limitations.

A technically dense post on security hardening for Kubernetes clusters. This sample demonstrates that I can work fluently with highly specialized infrastructure content, preserving precision while improving structure and readability for a knowledgeable audience.

A data engineering post aimed at practitioners migrating large-scale data infrastructure, this sample shows range across the data domain—relevant to an organization where quantitative data work is central to everything.

This 158-page style guide was written and compiled for the Technical Communications team at NCBRT, the emergency management training center at Louisiana State University, where I served as adjunct editor for nearly eleven years. Based on The Chicago Manual of Style, the guide extends that style to fill the gaps created by the specialized subject matter and covers abbreviations, capitalization, citations, grammar, numbers, punctuation, source formatting, and usage specific to emergency management and federal training contexts.

Building it required auditing inconsistencies across years of existing course materials, making judgment calls about contested usage, and writing guidance clearly enough that non-editor subject-matter experts could apply it independently.

This regional emergency operations plan was produced for FEMA Region 10 in preparation for a Cascadia Subduction Zone seismic event—one of the highest-consequence natural disaster scenarios in North America. The document is multi-agency, multi-author, and structured to be used operationally under crisis conditions, where clarity and precision are not abstract virtues but practical requirements.

The editing challenges were structural as much as stylistic: ensuring consistent terminology across authors who wrote independently, maintaining logical flow across sections with different owners, verifying that cross-references and role assignments were internally coherent, and catching claims that subtly contradicted each other across sections. The document had to read as one coherent plan, not a collection of contributions.

At 2,557 pages covering more than twenty participating jurisdictions, this plan represents the largest class of document in my regular editorial practice. Hazard mitigation plans of this scale are produced by assembling dozens of individually authored Word files—written by planners, subject-matter experts, and jurisdiction representatives across the county—into a single unified document, which is then edited for consistency, coherence, and compliance with FEMA formatting and content standards before submission.

The editorial process is genuinely collaborative: the IEM Technical Communications Team contributes at multiple stages, with different editors taking ownership of different sections and phases. On this project, an outside editing firm was also engaged to manage volume; IEM editors, including me, reviewed and reconciled their work alongside our own. Final quality review of the combined document—checking for terminology drift, broken cross-references, inconsistent role assignments, and formatting compliance—requires one editor to hold the whole in view at once.

The document goes through multiple submission cycles: to the client for review, back to IEM for revisions, to the state for approval, back again, and ultimately to FEMA. FEMA approval is required for jurisdictions to remain eligible for federal hazard mitigation planning grants—which means the accuracy and internal consistency of the document is not an editorial nicety but a condition of federal funding.

This toolkit comprises three complete sets of Emergency Operations Center handbook templates—covering ICS/ICS-Like, Incident Support Model, and Departmental organizational structures—along with development guides and more than thirty modified ICS forms for each structure. All templates were developed in accordance with NIMS guidance and regional subject-matter expertise for use by emergency management jurisdictions across the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area.

The editorial challenge was consistency at scale across a large suite of operationally interdependent documents: ensuring that terminology, structure, and procedural language were uniform across handbook sets designed for different organizational models, while maintaining the precision that documents used under crisis conditions require. The toolkit was produced in my first year at IEM as sole editor under project manager Don Broughton and has since been adopted and published by NCTCOG for distribution to member jurisdictions.