WHERE DID YOU GROW UP? WHAT WAS YOUR PATH TO UPS?

I grew up in Walnut Creek in the San Francisco Bay Area. I earned my 
undergraduate degree from Colorado College (in Colorado Springs... you 
can guess what state). I had a double major in Mathematics (with an 
emphasis on Computer Science, as my school didn't have an independent 
CS major then) and English. I spent a year running a computer lab in 
CC's Economics department, and then headed to graduate school in the 
Informatics department at the University of California Irvine. I earned 
my MS in Informatics studying crowdsourcing systems, and did my 
dissertation work on using games to encourage environmental sustainability. 
I just joined the Math/CS department here this Fall, and am incredibly 
excited to be here! 


HOW MUCH PROGRAMMING HAVE YOU DONE (& WHAT LANGUAGES)?

I began programming casually in high school: I wrote programs and games 
on my TI-86 Calculator, defined new areas and quests for a MUD (which is 
like a text-based World of Warcraft game), and experimented with HTML/CSS, 
Javascript, and eventually PHP and MySQL. In college I mostly studied Java, 
as well as learning some C and C++. But this gave me a foundation to pick 
up pretty much any language; in grad school I mostly wrote code in Ruby and 
Javascript (making online systems with Ruby on Rails), and I taught classes 
in Python. Many of my projects are online and linked from my webpage.


WHAT ARE YOUR HOBBIES?

My biggest hobbies are gaming (tabletop RPGs and video games) and watching 
films (I'm a big fan of classic cinema). My wife and I are also currently 
learning different ballroom dances, as well as working on exploring Tacoma 
and all it has to offer!
Oh yeah, and I love building Lego models, many of which are displayed around 
my office.


WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR TALENTS & SKILLS?

I'm very good at word-play, and enjoy making terrible puns. I played the 
french horn in orchestra for years and years, and so have a pretty good ear 
for rhythms and music... but I can't sing a note!


HAVE YOU DONE ANYTHING REMARKABLE? HAS ANYTHING MEMORABLE HAPPENED TO YOU?

I wrote a paper in grad school that was cited more than 100 times within 2 years 
(that's a lot). I also managed to, within 48 hours, get special approval from 
two different academic committees to teach a writing class when the regular 
instructor fell ill--all on less than a day's notice. As an undergraduate, I 
earned an award for my English thesis on narratology, and I was also named the 
"Most Promising Future Faculty" at UCI for 2012. I've also traveled quite a bit--
for example, in high school my orchestra went on a 3-week Australian tour.


WHAT COMMITMENTS WILL BE CONSUMING YOUR CYCLES THIS SEMESTER?

I'm teaching two sections of this class, as well as CSCI 240: Software Engineering. 
In addition, this semester I'll need to finalize and defend my dissertation to 
finally get my PhD. A dissertation defense is like a 3 hour oral exam, where you're 
grilled relentlessly about your research by the smartest people you know.