About
Presently, I'm software engineer at Google. There I work on the very large scale problem of serving millions of users the information they need quickly, reliably and completely. My research interests lie in the broad area of distributed systems with a focus upon resilience in high performance computing. I've always had a passion (aka obsession) for deeply understanding how things work, as a child I tore apart my fathers stereo equipment and today I want to demystify how processes interact in the presence of failures. This has and continues to be the underlying driver in my life.
I received my PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Computer Science in 2014. Prior to that I completed my Masters in Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh in 2007. In my masters thesis I sought to find ways to securely distribute data in large-scale systems in such a way that it could only be recovered by its rightful owner. This work received the acronym SCAR (Scatter, Conceal and Recover) and continues to pique my interest. Prior to that I completed my Bachelors of Science degree from Bethany College in Mathematics and Computer Science.
In between all this I've started a few companies (Cobind, Wellspring Worldwide) and been involved with many others (Civic Science, Bossa Nova, Rhiza Labs). This personifies my other passion in life which is creating something out of nothing. Its magical to envision a world and actually build it with your own hands. Granted my worlds tend to exist on the screen and in code but I would argue that today these environments are almost as tangible as the physical world.
Personally, I'm interested in making a good cocktail, drinking good beer, hiking mountains and running road races. I'm a huge music fan so you will routinely run into me at local music venues digging on music from R&B to bluegrass and everything in between. I also volunteer at the local children's hospital because nothing will put your world in perspective more than playing video games with a sick child.