About Me

If you're bored or would like to better understand my history, here are some biographical tidbits.

Some Biographical Information

I was born on March 30, 1977 in Fremont, Nebraska. In high school, my interests included piano, percussion, public speaking, track, and cross country. I had planned upon majoring in concert piano until I took my first college calculus class during my senior year.

I studied abroad in Germany in 1996, met my wife in Nebraska in 1999, and married her in 2000. Since then, every day of my life has been a little better than the day before.

During the course of my educational and academic career, I've lived in Lincoln, NE; Berlin and Hanover, Germany; Minneapolis, MN; Irvine, CA; and Houston, TX.

Education

I received my B.A. in mathematics and German at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in May 1999, with minors in economics and physics. I graduated with highest distinction (summa cum laude) and as a Chancellor's Scholar (4.0 GPA). Honors included an undergraduate honors thesis, a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, and membership in Phi Beta Kappa.

I received my M.S. in mathematics at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) in September 2003. Honors include a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

I completed my Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of California at Irvine in June 2007. Honors include the Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award and recognition for service to the mathematics department and the School of Physical Sciences.

A Brief Research History

My first research project as an undergraduate was to numerically simulate contaminant transport in groundwater flow using finite difference methods. My advisors were J. David Logan and Steve Cohn; Thomas Shores was a sort of informal third co-advisor for me. This work culminated in an undergraduate honors thesis, which was necessary for graduating from UNL's honors program.

At the University of Minnesota, I started off researching fiber optics and fiber Bragg gratings under Fadil Santosa in cooperation with Alessandra Chiareli at 3M (June 2000-August 2001). After that, I switched advisors to John Lowengrub to study computational modeling of tumor growth.

At UCI, I continued to work on modeling tumor growth with John Lowengrub and began collaborating with Alexander Anderson, Mark Chaplain, and Steven McDougall on coupling their angiogenesis model with our tumor growth code.

Here at UTHSC-H, I'm now working under Vittorio Cristini on a new generation of tumor growth and angiogenesis models.

Other Interests

Time for other interests?? Surely, you jest! Nonetheless, I am the author and maintainer of EasyBMP, an easy-to-use, cross-platform C++ windows bitmap (BMP) library. I also wrote a simple utility to covert sequences of bitmap images to an uncompressed AVI movie; check it out at the Easy BMP to AVI project page.