How to Reach Me
Bio
One of my favorite things in life is applying my technical skills in computer science to fields that I've never worked in before.
I've had wonderful opportunities for this in both my work under a materials science professor and my internships at H3D. Working under the materials science professor, Dr John Kieffer at the University of Michigan, my first task was to reimplement an old program that previously would only run on Windows 7. It controlled motors that moved mirrors to redirect lasers for light scattering measurements. Needless to say, I had never worked with this sort of equipment before, and had certainly never measured a material's properties via light scattering. I delighted in that project. When I started at H3D, I had never worked in nuclear engineering, never taken a single class in the subject. Even as my work was a degree of separation from any proper nuclear physics, it gave me opportunities to learn so much about how radiation and its detection work.
That's another thing to know about me: I always need to be learning something. Whether it's a new technology, industry-specific knowledge, or even just the particular practices of a workplace, if I'm not learning something new every week I'm not satisfied. Sometimes it's not what one would expect to be learning either--while I did learn a lot about radiation detection at H3D, I also learned so much about Git. I had thought I was competent at it going in, but having now come out the other side, it's like night and day.
In my projects outside of work, I love recognizing that I can write a program to solve a problem I've been experiencing. I did this most recently with Taskit, which I use to track the amount of time i spend over the course of my work each day--across my classes, my job, and the work I've been contributing to help run my house of 150 residents. I wanted to track my time, but all the methods I had tried before had either had way-too-high activation energy to use consistently or were too simplistic to capture the kind of data I wanted. By building my own solution, I was able to strike the balance exactly where I needed it to be--and as it turns out, it is a balance that others in my life have also found useful.