I grew up in a large immigrant family in the Bay Area.
My parents came from Israel to the United States through school, work, and a lot of risk. They eventually built a life in California with six kids. My first clear memories are from Albany and Walnut Creek. In our house, education was not a slogan. It was one of the tools my parents trusted because it had helped them get here.
One family story I still picture is my father training shot put before he had much equipment. He would find a rock, hold it like a shot, throw it, jog after it, and keep repeating until the rock broke. I do not know which parts got bigger in the telling. What stayed with me was the resourcefulness: use what is available and keep training.
School did not always reach me. I pushed back on explanations that felt thin, and I did not do much work until the work had a concrete reason. Basketball was the first place I tried to be good at something. Being bigger than other kids made it easy to fool myself. When everyone caught up, I learned I had skipped too much of the boring work. Wrestling later made that much harder to hide.
Wrestling gave me structure quickly.
I started wrestling as a high-school freshman, pushed onto the mat to fill a heavyweight spot. Up to then, my only real exposure to "wrestling" was the WWE. That first season changed my body and my confidence. I lost close to 40 pounds, and training, travel, and competition became part of my life for years.
One early marker was fifth at Cadet Greco Nationals in Fargo, a few months into the sport. I was unknown enough that some parents thought I must be a transfer who had grown up wrestling. I had not. That result did not make me good enough. It made the training feel real. By then the sport was already shaping school, travel, who I trained with, and eventually how I'd coach.
School and training had to fit into the same day.
Ohio State was an early college wrestling step. Northern Michigan was where school and Greco-Roman training had to fit inside the same day.
San Francisco State brought me back to the Bay Area for graduate study, coaching, and training. At UCSF, the science became narrower: build the tool, test what the DNA does, read the result, revise.
At UCSF, I study functional genomics and synthetic regulatory DNA.
At UCSF, I am a PhD candidate in the Nadav Ahituv Lab. My research is designing and building synthetic regulatory DNA to study how genes are controlled, and where that breaks down in disease.
I like the directness of the work: build something, test it, read the result, and stay honest when the result is inconvenient.
Coaching is where experience has to become useful.
Coaching matters to me because experience has to be translated before it helps anyone. The MAT Association comes from the same concern: access to good training, academic support, and adult standards around combat sports.
I want that work to stay practical: people on the mat, real practices, and small systems that survive after the idea sounds good.
Current focus.
These days that means gene editing in the lab, training toward the 2028 Olympic cycle, coaching, and the MAT Association. I keep the priorities simple: move the experiments forward, train consistently, and keep my commitments clear.
