About Me
I grew up in California in the shadow of Stanford University. My father is a professor of Anthropology at Stanford and as a youngster my family had many opportunities to travel when he went on trips or on sabbatical. From these many childhood trips, I gained a curiousity for exploring the world and an interest in taking pictures.
In the Fall of 2000 I entered Carleton College in Northfield, MN. After a fabulous four years of a broad liberal arts education, ice hockey, and frisbee, I graduated with a Bachelors in Physics. While at Carleton I also met my future wife, Danielle.
After college I spent a year back in the San Francisco Bay Area figuring out what I wanted to do next. During that time I worked on the startup phase of Stanford's first entry to the DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous car race. I was on the path planning team and the experience cemented my interest in pursuing robotics. Also during this time, my friend Peter introduced me to voting theory which has been an interest of mine ever since.
In Sept 2005 I came to the Mechanical Engineering Dept. at UCSB to pursue graduate studies in controls and robotics. I received my Masters in June 2007 for a project on controlling a particular dynamical systems phenomenon. Since then I have focused on algorithms for teams of robots while building up a hardware test bed here at UCSB.