Childhood
I was born in Newton, MA in
1975 and spent the first five years of my life living in Massachusetts
and Connecticut . In 1981, my family moved to
Fremont, CA where we lived
happily for eight years. In the eighth grade, my family moved to
Tulsa, OK for just over two years
(an experience I do not recommend to others). When I was a sophomore in High
School, we escaped to
Amherst, NH where I
had the pleasure of going to a
small high school (an experience I highly recommend) with only 400 students.
After my Junior year, I spent the summer at the
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
in Socorro, NM. It was my first taste of
college life and probably the best summer I had growing up. While I was there,
my family moved back to Fremont, CA,
where I spent my Senior year of High School at
Mission San Jose. After having been to three
High Schools (another one of those experiences that I do not recommend), I was
very happy to graduate in June of 1993.
College
In the fall of 1993, I packed up and went back to
Boston, MA to start college at
Boston University. I started as an Aerospace
Engineering major, but quickly decided I wasn't really interested in taking five
pages of math to calculate the stress on a ball bearing at the back of some
machine. At the same time, I decided it was fun to write a computer program to
do it for me. So after three semesters, I decided to leave BU to go somewhere
else. Since I wasn't sure exactly where I wanted to go, I figured it was a good
time to see another part of the world. So I applied to the
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT)
in Melbourne, Australia. I arrived
there in February, 1995 and started working on my Computer Science degree. I loved
it so much that I decided to stay there until I graduated two years later. Living
abroad is something everyone should do at least once in their lives. Visiting a
place is nice, but you never get a really good feel for what the place and the
people there are all about until you've lived there for at least six months or a year.
Work
When I got back to California in December of 1996, I started looking for a job. I
found one at Sterling Software, working on one of their contracts at
NASA's Ames Research Center. I started out working in
the Verification and Validation (V&V) lab for the
Center/TRACON Automation System (CTAS)
project. CTAS is one of the tools that the airports of the US desperately need. The
goal of the project is to assist the controllers in deciding which planes should
land first to keep the whole airspace operating efficiently. The test system has
been in daily use in Dallas/Fort Worth for the past few years, and they have been
able to increase the number of planes the airport can safely handle in one hour by
about 20% (my numbers could be wrong, but I think that's close). After about a year,
I moved from the V&V lab to the User Interface development team, where I worked
on maintaining and extending the two programs used to interact with the CTAS system.
In 1999, I decided to return to school for my Ph.D. When I was accepted to the
University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), I
decided to leave CTAS, and took a position as a consultant at
Network Associates working on a new version of
their Sniffer product.
Graduate School
In the summer of 2000, I moved to Santa Cruz, CA, and that fall I started my
graduate studies at UCSC's School of Engineering.