Meet J.R.

I grew up just outside Cleveland in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Though I’ve lived in Seattle since 2013, my sports allegiances remain stubbornly and foolishly with the professional Cleveland teams. When the Cavs won the title in 2016, I bought everyone in my local bar a round of drinks. When I need to look cool, I wear a pair of LeBrons (he’s a better person, role model, and basketball player than Jordan).

After graduating from Yale, I moved to Beijing, where I lived and worked for two years. I traveled, learned a passable amount of Chinese, attended the 2008 Olympics, and met my wife, another young Jewish American in search of a post-college adventure.

The thing I hated most about Beijing was the smog. An acrid miasma so thick that I could taste it from my bed most mornings often hung over the city. This pollution sapped me of energy, eroded my joy, and led me to swap dreams of a career in the State Department for one focused on mitigating climate change. A year after leaving China, I enrolled in a graduate degree focused on international business and climate policy at The Fletcher School, Tufts University.

My path from grad school to a job in corporate sustainability took a few years. It began with an inside sales job where I made cold calls (poorly) before transitioning to an entry-level retail job at Amazon where I sold an ungodly number of SSDs and memory sticks.

I caught a break when Amazon established a sustainability team in 2014 and I become one of the first internal transfers to it. For six years, I helped build out the sustainability function at Amazon, touching everything from packaging to private brands, electronic devices to sustainability science.

I left Amazon when two full-time jobs and two boys under five became too much for us. Once things started to normalize, I got back into corporate sustainability.

For the past fews years, I’ve been the VP of sustainability at Worldly, a SaaS company that helps recognizable brands like Target, H&M, Patagonia, Eileen Fisher, and Nike reduce the environmental impacts and social harms in their supply chains. (The picture on the right is of me speaking at the Worldly Customer Forum in Hong Kong in 2025.)

I live in Seattle with my wife and three kids. For our first 11 years in Seattle, we had a strange dog named Oscar that I loved fiercely; I wrote about his life here, and our journey to spread his ashes here.

If you live in Seattle and see someone swimming near Seward Park in Lake Washington near Seward Park, there’s a good chance it’s me.

If you’ve gotten this far into my extended bio, I encourage you to sign up for my Substack and/or newsletter, which will chronicle my trip towards becoming a published author.