Personal
Mini-Biography
I was born in 1974 in Berkeley, CA, and lived there until I finished
high school. My family lived in several places, mostly in the
vicinity of the North Berkeley BART station. I attended Berkeley
public schools for most of my childhood education, except for one
critical year at Berkeley Montessori that re-invigorated my interest
in education. I spent four years at Berkeley High, trying to get by
without doing any homework and playing lots of frisbee. By the time
I was done, I was ready to get out of town.
In 1992, I moved to Portland, OR, to attend Lewis & Clark
College. Lewis & Clark provided me with two critical
experiences: meeting Alissa and discovering the science of
psychology. The first led to our wedding, in Portland in the summer
of 1997. The second led me to research in human-computer
interaction with Erik Nilsen, a professor at Lewis & Clark, and
then to grad school.
We moved to Ann Arbor, MI, in 1996 so I could begin graduate study
in Psychology at the University of Michigan. I worked with Dave
Meyer, studying how people perform multiple tasks simultaneously
(not well), and with Bill Gehring, studying neural correlates of
error monitoring. Eventually, I started a research project with
Dave investigating how short-term memory handles visual information,
and this became my dissertation.
In 2001, before I had managed to finish grad school, we became
parents to Maya. I stayed home with her full-time for a year and
part-time for another year while I finished the dissertation (with
much help from several awesome research assistants). Maya attended
lab meetings with me and hung out with several extraordinarily
helpful friends. By the time I was done, she was at least as
qualified for a Ph.D. as I was.
My dissertation project led to an interest in how the visual system
works. After I finished my dissertation, I got a position as a
research fellow in the lab run by Jeremy Wolfe and Todd Horowitz in
Boston. We study visual attention, the system that compresses and
filters the massive amount of visual information constantly present
in our environment. The lab is engaged in a multitude of research
projects, both on its own and through collaborations with other
groups, and Boston is a major center for vision research, so I am in
heaven here.
The funny thing about my job is the titles that come with it. The
lab is part of the Center for Ophthalmic Research, which is in the
Department of Surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Being part
of the hospital also means being part of the Harvard Medical School.
So, the job comes with a Harvard email address and a hospital badge
that says I'm in surgery!
Family
My wife is a program manager for a non-profit
called Harbinger
Partners. Harbinger works with other non-profit companies to
evaluate their technology needs and find ways to improve them.
Then, they coordinate with volunteers from the IT departments of
for-profit companies to implement the improvements. It's like
pro-bono work for lawyers applied to the technology sector.
Maya is my fabulous daughter. She
attends Pine Village
Preschool, an awesome bi-lingual school for 2-6 year-olds. You
can see plenty of her in the photo album, below.
Our family photo album, mostly pictures of Maya, is
here.
|