My journey as an academic and human being has been fairly unconventional. Starting with a degree in English Lit and Sociology, I left my marketing job to fulfill my lifelong dream of documenting the lives of North Korean refugees as a Master’s student at the University of Oxford. I went on to manage the Canada-DPRK Knowledge Partnership Program and serve as Editor at LinkedIn Pulse and the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy. A life-changing incident in Seoul led me to pivot into Internet research - and here I am a decade later, studying the rise of virtual personalities and the impact of AI in the ways we understand race, gender, and love.