I was born in Austin, Minnesota, on March 23, 1972. Including Austin, I have lived in twelve different locations in seven different states in America. My family finally settled down in the small (about 11,000 people) town of La Grande, Oregon. Besides beautiful scenery and several different climates, Oregon has the distinction of being one of the few states with no sales tax. La Grande is home of Eastern Oregon State College, although the primary economy is based on logging via a Boise Cascade plant.
My favorite sport would definitely have to be tennis. Once the bowling alley in La Grande closed, and after they built a dome up at EOSC, tennis even became a viable winter sport for me. Although I enjoy other games like raquetball, ping-pong, baseball, and basketball, tennis remains my preferred sport.
During the summer following my second year in high school, I got my first job as a serf working at the local McDonald's. It was quite exciting, but alas, it ended after less than a month when I quit. Too exciting.
My next flirtation with employment came the following summer, when I worked at the Union County Fairgrounds doing odd jobs such as painting and setting up sheep pens. During the fair I cleaned up after the animals and after the people. It's still difficult for me to decide which was messier, but at least the animals didn't leave half empty styrofoam cups of beer everywhere.
After finishing high school I moved on to college. I attended a small (about 700 students) engineering school in Claremont, California named Harvey Mudd College. The four years I spent there were way too short in my view.
The summer following my first year at HMC, I got a great job (finally) working with the Chemistry Animation Project (CAP). The goal of this project was to create computer generated videos for use in learning college level chemistry. This was in 1991, the same summer that Terminator 2 came out and computer animation was just starting to enter the public eye. CAP is based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. I liked the job so much that I went back after my second summer as well.
The third summer I spent in Indiana at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology working on mathematical research under the tutelage of Prof. Gary Sherman. My funding came from a National Science Foundation program called Research Experience for Undergraduates. Various professors from around the country each give their time to give undergrads a few months experience in what research is all about. Gary is a great guy, and it was this summer that convinced me that I wanted to do research.
So when I graduated with a degree in mathematics from HMC, I decided to head off to graduate school. I went to the Operations Research department at Cornell University which turned out to be a great decision. It is a wonderful department with faculty sporting a wide range of interests and a close knit group of students as well. My thesis advisor there was Prof. David Shmoys. After five years at Cornell I received my Ph.D., for work concentrating on Monte Carlo Markov chain methods.
After earning my doctorate, I was awarded a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Mathematical Sciences. I was able to work with Persi Diaconis at Stanford for two years.
Presently I am an Assistant Professor at Duke University. My primary appointment is in the Department of Mathematics, with a secondary appointment in the Institute of Statistics and Decision Sciences. The Durham area is very different from what I expected. Prior to the Civil War it was mostly small farmers. During and after the war the type of tobacco grown in the area was introduced to the northern states, and the industry took off. The American Tobacco Company, with headquarters in Durham, held a world wide monopoly in production, until a series of progressive presidents broke the monopoly in the early 1900's. By that time the farming community could not compete with the Midwest, and the area mostly returned to forest. Duke University was founded with money from Duke Power Company, which in turn was initially funded by Duke's money from the American Tobacco Company. It was started during the 20's, but wasn't completed until the Great Depression had begun. Still, the university did well, and by 1950 when the state of North Carolina decided they needed to draw more high tech jobs to the state, they decided on the Durham/Raleigh/Chapel Hill area (the Triangle) to build Research Triangle Park. Between NC State in Raleigh, Duke in Durham, UNC-Chapel Hill, and RTP, not to mention Duke University Hospital and host of other smaller medical centers, the area is definitely part of the modern economy. All in all, I have found Durham a great place to live and Duke to be an excellent environment for teaching and research.
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