From a young age, I was immersed in science, living each summer at the Bowdoin College Scientific Station at Kent Island in the Bay of Fundy. Kent Island had no running water and the only electricity came from solar power. The only way to take a hot shower was to heat up a basin of water. To get that water you had to haul it from the well. There were only 8-15 people at the remote field station at a time. None of them were close to my age. This meant that I needed to find my own fulfillment. When not helping with science or doing community chores, I would be out on my own around animals. I would walk the rocky beaches inhabited by dense populations of gulls all around. I felt especially close to nature seeing the rearing process from cracked egg to flight. Dodging poop from aerial attacks was essential but not always successful. When helping my father in the field, I spent a lot of time reaching into underground burrows and pulling out incubating birds. I would record data while researchers banded and measured the birds. Summers on Kent Island nourished my love for science and connection with animals.
When not helping with science or doing community chores, I would be out on my own around animals. I would walk the rocky beaches inhabited by dense populations of gulls all around. I felt especially close to nature seeing the rearing process from cracked egg to flight.
My childhood was split between summers in the Bay of Fundy and living in Ohio. Public school sports was a focus growing up. I tried soccer, football, basketball and water polo, but highschool arrived before my growth spurt arrived. I found lacrosse in middle school and it stuck. Keeping a positive attitude in the face of adversity was recognized by my coaches and teammates. This cemented my affinity for working as part of a team towards incremental growth and progress.
I was lucky to be an initial participant in Ohio’s new Project Lead the Way program. This allowed me to take college level engineering courses while in highschool. This led me to studying Physics and playing lacrosse at Kenyon College. After two years of balancing sports and academics, I came to the realization that for me to succeed in physics, I couldn’t both play lacrosse and be a physics major.
This was when I made the tough decision to quit the team. Leaving opened the door to opportunities in physics. Because I didn’t have sports obligations, I was able to attend a class trip to the American Physics Society conference. It was at this conference where my professor asked me to join a cosmology research lab which uses math and computers to simulate the evolution of the early universe. I taught myself the CUDA programming language to help the team do these simulations. During a conference at MIT, Alan Guth, the world authority on the inflation of the early universe, grilled me on my project. This is where I decided to direct my path towards making computers solve difficult problems.
After spending the winter after graduation traveling New Zealand, camping and hiking, I moved to California hoping to put to use what I had learned as a physics major. Before I hit my stride working with computers, I also taught math, physics and computer science in San Francisco. I continue to combine computer science with my love for animals.