Personal Information

Where I have lived, schooled, and worked

I was born in Lakewood, Ohio, on November 11, 1966, and lived in the Cleveland area until I was 3. My family then moved to Angola, Indiana, where I attended the local schools until graduating from Angola High in 1985.

I then enrolled at Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana), where I majored in Chemical Engineering. I graduated in 1990, having gotten a few years industrial experience with the Kimberly-Clark Corporation. While working, I lived in the Fox Cities area of Wisconsin (Appleton, Neenah, Menasha, etc.), except for one work term that was spent in Beech Island, South Carolina (near Aiken, SC and Augusta, Georgia).

After that, I decided to stay in the wonderful world of academia and moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where I began work on my Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering (interestingly enough, I designed the first version of the department's web site). While in graduate school, I spent a summer in Los Alamos, New Mexico. I finished my Ph.D. in the fall on 1996, but remained in Madison for another year to do post-doctorate work.

I then was employed by the University of Illinois, in Urbana-Champaign, where I spent a few years working on a software project in computational biology. I was affiliated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). If you are counting, that is three Big Ten schools (so far). In 1999, my supervisor at NCSA decided to switch schools to the University of California, San Diego, and I decided to go with him -- so I now am a California resident.

What I do outside of work

I guess this should be "what I used do outside of work that I was willing to tell most people." These days, I pretty much spend all my free time being a parent of a toddler, so a lot of this is outdated.

I am married, if you can believe that. Her name is Andreia, and we both work in the same group at SDSC. This is a nice picture of us early in our dating. We got married September 8, 2003, on a beach in Hanalei Bay, Kauai, Hawaii. In 2004, we bought a house in the Rancho Bernardo area of San Diego, just south of Lake Hodges.

In December of 2005, our daughter Grace was born, dramatically changing our lives forever. As you can imagine, most of our recent pictures feature Grace. Once we started Grace in day care, we decided our commute was really awful (being forced to drive during the rush hours made it a lot worse), so we sold our house in 2007 and moved back to the La Jolla / UTC area, where we had lived before (and are renting again, while we consider our future options).

Andreia and I used to like occasional hikes, and given the amount of places in the San Diego area and in California to do that, we had plenty of choices. We like small trips (e.g. San Francisco; Yosemite; Joshua Tree; Julian, CA) and taking pictures -- Andreia more than me. :-)

I'm a big fan of Purdue and University of Wisconsin sports teams, especially basketball and football. The Purdue affiliation sometimes caused a bit of friction within the family, as my mother is a fan of Purdue's chief rival. My favorite NFL team was the Cleveland Browns, which has been quite painful over the past 20 years thanks to John Elway and Art Modell. At least there is a team again, but I never warmed to the new verson of the Browns, and these days I am a San Diego Chargers fan more than anything (mainly due to Drew Brees). In baseball, I am a Cleveland Indians fan, which was fairly fun in the mid-to-late 90s, though I will never recover from the travesty on October 26, 1997.

I like to watch a bit of television, with most of the shows on my must-watch list being of the crime drama variety (all the Law & Order and CSI variants), with smattering of science fiction thrown in (Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Jericho, etc.). I also listen to a lot of music, chiefly semi-progressive rock like Rush and Kansas. My tastes run the gamut, though -- I own albums from America, Chicago, Devo, Radiohead, Tool, and the Who, among dozens of other groups.

This was probably more than you wanted to know.

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