Rudy de Leon Dinglas is ready to spin again, and again

It was 6 a.m., and the contestants were standing on an empty soundstage, signing nondisclosure agreements and trying to absorb the fact that they were really there. Then a staff member walked in and announced that someone wanted to say good morning.

They looked up.

Vanna White, in pajamas. Glorious.

"She was the most friendly person. It's not an act," recalls Rudy de Leon Dinglas. "She greeted each of us and gave us one piece of advice: Stay in the moment and have fun."

For Dinglas, that felt less like celebrity advice and more like a reminder of how he tries to live anyway, at work, in community, and now, under studio lights.

During the work week, Dinglas serves as chief of staff for the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence, known as GovEx, a team of about 60 people at Johns Hopkins that partners with cities to help government leaders use performance information, data, AI, and emerging technology to tackle the issues that keep mayors up at night. He manages the operations and administration of the center, which sits in the School of Government and Policy, while also serving as a subject matter expert on data and performance management, work that draws on his background in practice and academia. He holds a doctorate in public policy from UMBC and has been affiliated with several universities.

But the "other life" that brought him to a Culver City, California, film studio began decades ago in a family living room.

Dinglas immigrated to the United States in 1996 with his parents, and he still remembers a simple household ritual that helped make a new country feel familiar: After dinner each night, the family would gather to watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! and play along.

"For 30 years I've been doing that," he says.

Over time, his life grew full. He teaches public administration today, travels internationally, loves gift wrapping, and stays deeply involved in Baltimore through board memberships and volunteer work, including with Moveable Feast, St. Vincent's Villa, and Catholic Charities. And still, the wheel remained a kind of steady thread. So last year, he finally asked himself a question that surprised even him: Why not me?

"I have a story. I have quirky things about my life. And I think I can go toe-to-toe on a puzzle," Dinglas says. "I'm not Jeopardy! material, but I think I'm Wheel of Fortune material."

After a burst of courage, he applied in spring 2025. Just a fresh headshot and the requested bio, no video.

"I didn't send a video because I hate myself on videos," Dinglas says, laughing at his own honesty.

Then came a Zoom interview that was not really an interview at all. It was a virtual room full of contestants playing puzzles. "I was shocked, and then I got very competitive," he says grinning. "I was just trying to win every puzzle. I did."

In the months that followed, the show's messages arrived in spurts: questions about what types of episodes he preferred and his interests, curiosity about an ice cream pilgrimage he once took, and then silence. Then finally, a call that changed everything. There would be a taping in December, in Culver City. A golden ticket to Wheel of Fortune nostalgia. He rearranged his life and prepared with the determination of someone who breathes the game. He watched every episode, worked through all the paper puzzles, and even bought an electronic Wheel of Fortune device. He was obsessed.

When he arrived in Los Angeles on Dec. 4, the taping itself moved by in a blur. "It was absolutely the quickest 25 minutes of my life," he says. His was the fifth episode recorded that day, so he waited as production rolled through multiple tapings and watched the machine that keeps the show running, moment after moment, take after take. After a few hours, his gregarious nature made the studio feel like his living room at home.

For all the bright lights, the most powerful moment was personal.

"My mother passed right before I joined the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence seven years ago," Dinglas says, describing a grief that ran deep, and the change he needed in the wake of it. He left Baltimore City government and found a new home at Hopkins. He carries a tattoo of his mother's handwriting on his wrist, and every time he spun the wheel, he looked down at his hand on those famous pegs and thought of her. "OK Mom, let's make sure I win something over here!"

He also carried the weight, and the joy, of family history. In the audience sat his father and two of his oldest siblings.

"I tried not to look because it was just such a surreal experience," he says. He thought about the family watching Wheel of Fortune in East Baltimore in 1996, "fresh off a plane from the Philippines," never imagining that one day he would be at the wheel.

If Hopkins helped prepare him for Wheel of Fortune, Dinglas says it was not because his work taught him to be polished. It taught him to be present.

In his role, relationship building is not a soft skill; it is the beginning of the work. Cities, and government leaders, he says, cannot get from point A to point B without trust.

That same instinct shapes how he shows up at Hopkins. Early on, Dinglas naturally became what he calls the "cruise ship director," the person creating holiday parties and finding ways to keep people connected, even during the isolation of 2020, when he started virtual happy hours.

"I've always believed that [if] you take care of the people and you connect with the people and you make sure that they have the resources, the work will get done," he says.

On Wheel of Fortune, that people-first mindset became a competitive advantage. The show moves fast, he says, and the only way to keep your footing is to stay grounded, connected to your fellow contestants, and alive to what is happening right now, in front of you.

That is also what made Vanna White's pajama-clad pep talk feel so perfectly timed.

And it is what has him thinking about what comes next, even before his episode airs on Friday, Jan. 23.

In the studio, Dinglas realized that many contestants were "serial game show folks," people who have hopped from one set to another over the years. His reaction was immediate and unmistakable: He wants in.

"One of my goals for the spring is to plant all of the game show seeds across different networks and see what grows," he says. "I've always wanted to be a talk show host. Maybe this is dipping my toe in that water."

Before the taping, his team at GovEx had one request. "Just don't go out there and become a meme," he recalls, smiling.

He did not. "I told them I made everyone proud."

And in the end, that mattered most.