I study the internal processes that make people resilient — starting with the people who build our digital world.
I am a doctoral candidate specialising in psychological resilience — specifically the individual, internal mental and emotional processes through which people adapt to adversity. My research focuses on software developers: one of the most cognitively demanding, chronically pressured professional populations of our time.
But the questions my research asks are universal. What determines how you read a difficult situation? Why does one person experience a setback as a threat while another sees the same situation as a challenge? What builds the psychological capacity to keep going — clearly and effectively — when the pressure is relentless?
My ambition is to make rigorous resilience science genuinely accessible — translating what researchers know into something people can actually use in their lives and work.
Not grit. Not optimism. Not simply bouncing back. Resilience is a dynamic psychological process — the role of mental processes in protecting us from the negative effects of stressors. It operates before coping, at the level of how we appraise what is happening to us.
Resilience is not a fixed trait you either have or don't. The evidence is clear: it is fosterable. The question is what builds it — which protective factors, what experiences, what internal processes strengthen the capacity to face adversity without being depleted by it.
Software developers face chronic, cognitively demanding, professionally embedded stress. They are the test case for resilience in modern knowledge work. What we learn here has implications for every person who must keep performing when everything pushes back.
The resilience literature is rich, rigorous — and largely invisible to the people who need it most. My work translates the science into ideas that are precise enough to be useful and human enough to be felt.
"Two developers receive the same critical bug report. One sees disaster. One sees a puzzle. That difference is not personality — it is resilience. And it is trainable."
"Developers are expert copers. But coping and resilience are not the same thing. A person who is always coping is not necessarily resilient — they may simply be running on empty."
"Some exposure to adversity predicts better mental health than none at all. The goal is not to eliminate pressure — it is to build the internal capacity to meet it."
Most people think resilience is about recovery — bouncing back after adversity. The research tells a different story. Resilience operates upstream of the stress response, at the level of how we appraise what is happening to us. Here is what that means for how we build it.
They are often used interchangeably. They are not the same thing. Here is the distinction the research draws.
Early findings from doctoral research — and what they suggest for all knowledge workers under sustained pressure.
Psychological resilience in software developers — thesis in progress
Individual psychological processes of adaptation and resilience under occupational stress
Translating resilience science for practitioners, leaders, and the genuinely curious
Available for research talks, workshops, and consulting engagements