A social scientist who also gets the technology

I understand people first.
Then I build.

I'm a product of the liberal arts: trained as a social scientist first, then I learned to build. For 15 years I've gone into rooms where people had problems they couldn't fully articulate yet, found what they actually needed, and built it. AI, geospatial, public health, supply chain: the domain changes, the approach doesn't.

See the work → Let's talk
Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder at F&T Labs · Northern Illinois
Juliana McMillan-Wilhoit
30m → 5m
Time to answer a routine question (Sauk County, 83% reduction)
50+
Public health professionals interviewed before writing a line of code
100%
Staff adoption within 30 days (PH360™'s first county rollout)
8h → 30m
Daily crisis reporting: Hurricane Maria power restoration
Listen. Ask Why. Build.

Most tools fail for the same reason: nobody listened to the people who would use them. The technology is rarely what's wrong. I've built for public health departments, the U.S. military, and Fortune 500 supply chains. Every time, whatever the technology happened to be, the work started the same way. I went to the people first.

I'm not an AI evangelist. I'm a social scientist with a toolbox. I'm interested in what's actually broken, and what the right tool is to fix it. Sometimes that's AI. Sometimes it's a Python script and a better process. That gap between "what the technology can do" and "what the team can absorb" is where I do my best work.

Public Health AI Geospatial Analytics AWS Bedrock & AI Architecture Supply Chain Defense / DOD Process Mapping
Selected Work

The pattern, in the work I do now

Different problems, different organizations, and the same way every time: go find the people who live with the problem, and build from what they tell you. The recent work first. Fifteen years of it underneath.

PH360 food code assistant: chat interface answering an inspector's question with a citation
5m
F&T Labs · Public Health AI
PH360™: Built for the people running local public health
Tested 5+ LLMs, hand-coded the first prototype, interviewed 50+ users before writing a line of product code. HIPAA-compliant, Sunshine Law-ready, built on AWS Bedrock.
30m → 5m
Time to answer a routine question (Sauk County)
Full story →
"A plan its own people recognized themselves in."
1:1
F&T Labs · State Health Department · Change Management
The technology wasn't the risk. The people were wary, and right to be
A state health department's data modernization was going to live or die on its people. I interviewed the data stewards themselves, then built the change plan around their values: empathy-led, not template-driven.
Theirs to run
A plan the department carries without us (capacity-building was the point)
Full story →
"If the workflow is deterministic, build it."
2p
F&T Labs · AI Operations · Ongoing
The AI stack I run my own company on
A transcript-driven video pipeline, a voice-memo research database, and a security audit for every integration before it's adopted. Not a project that ended. It's the way I work, every week.
2-person team
That ships video, content, and research like it has a studio behind it
Full story →
Land-use map of North Chicago, Illinois: the study area for the community-based research
180+
F&T Labs · Community-Based Research
CBPR in North Chicago: 25 interviews, 180+ surveys, 6 weeks
Standard research methods weren't going to work, so we went where people already were, community festivals and a parade, and asked what mattered to them.
Bilingual
English + Spanish executive summary delivered back to the community
Full story →
All case studies →
See all references →
3× National Keynote
MCH Conference 2026 · WV GeoCon 2024 · KS Mappers 2023
Community Builder
AI for Public Health CoP · 2,000-person geospatial audience
Fulbright Scholar
Bulgaria · built a speech tournament that grew from 6 schools to 35+
Geospatial Rising Star
Awarded for ENSITE and geospatial community leadership
Get in touch

Let's figure out what's actually broken

Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder, F&T Labs · Northern Illinois.
Always happy to talk research, AI, public health, or product.

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