I build high-trust teams where questions are celebrated and ownership is real, creating the psychological safety necessary to ask big questions and take the risks required to answer them. This requires a subtle combination of independence and interdependence. We must be able to work on our own while simultaneously leaning on and collaborating with each other. This combination gives us the freedom to be creative, effective, and impactful as we drive results and push the bounds of human knowledge. In such environments, conflict is inevitable. By taking an us-against-the-problem approach, we put the problem on the wall and argue evidence, not intention, so teams leverage conflict as a tool to push us all forward and build beyond our individual visions. This turns team culture into a performance system that drives achievement and delivery while simultaneously fostering safety, care, and overall well-being.

Teams of this caliber require strong principles, values, and practices to succeed. Our values—psychological safety, ownership, care, and a balance of independence with interdependence—govern how we treat one another. My principles—integrity, transparency, empathy, curiosity, rigor, and gratitude—set our standards. Our practices translate both into concrete habits: we cross-check evidence across missions so insights cohere; we write plainly and explain choices; we archive code and methods with each result; each milestone has a directly responsible individual; weekly check-ins keep momentum; monthly "unlock" milestones ensure near-term wins open the larger architecture.

Today, we are building a new understanding of how the solar wind's helium abundance varies with the solar cycle, providing deep and nuanced insight into how helium impacts the solar wind's birth. These results also redefine how we understand the solar cycle and forecast its effects by separating two previously coupled problems: timing and amplitude of the solar cycle. This result strengthens solar cycle forecasts, improving our ability to safeguard human life and technology on Earth and in space.