Biography
I grew up outside of St.Paul, a small town in Northwest Arkansas. In 1998, I graduated from the
Arkansas School for Mathematics and Sciences. In 2002, I
graduated from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, with a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in math, and eight months experience in advocating for peace. I then spent six months digging ditches, working with a master stone mason, touring the mid-south on a 1976 Honda CB 540, and waiting for employment paperwork for a research position in the National Institute on Aging. I spent the next four and a half years in Baltimore working in the
Image Informatics and Computational Biology Unit, developing portions of the
Open Microscopy Environment (an Open Source image database and analysis system for scientific and medical applications), and developing pattern recognition tools for muscle aging studies. In my off-time I advocated for peace and social justice in respect to international debt and trade agreements, as well as serving on the board of the Greenmount West Community Development Corporation. For fun, I enjoy brainstorming, hiking, biking, reading, playing, conversing, building furniture, making art, and collecting stories. In 2007, I quit my job at the NIA to pursue graduate studies at UC Berkeley.