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 M.S. in Informatics studying crowdsourcing systems, and my Ph.D. on 
using games to support environmental education. I just joined the 
Math/CS department here this past Fall.


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 film (I'm 
a big fan of classic cinema, particularly from the 30s and 40s). My wife and 
I also are practicing our ballroom dancing (though we're still beginners).
Oh yeah, and I love building Lego models, some 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 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?

This semester I'm teaching three classes: CS 161, CS 261 (Computer Science II), 
and CS 440 (the CS Capstone Course). Since this is my first time teaching some 
of these classes, preparation tends to take a lot of time. I am also working on 
writing up a pair of short papers for publication.