I am a second year EECS PhD student, focusing on databases and distributed systems.

I am currently working with my advisor Joe Hellerstein on the BOOM / Lincoln project, which matches my research interests better than I could have hoped: we seek to apply the database research lessons of data independence and declarative languages to distributed computing problems like overlay routing, content-based addressing and consensus. I think computers are cool generally, so if I privilege systems over theory, ai or architecture, it's only because I understand them better at this moment. I am returning to school in order to learn, after all.

I graduated from Middlebury College in 1997 with a degree in English Literature and a minor in Philosophy. I bummed around for awhile and ended up in San Francisco in 1999, where fortune favored me and I caught the .com wave, and more or less rode it here.

Outside of my research, my interests include my amazing wife Severine, cycling, contemporary British/Irish drama, swimming, Elizabethan poetry, hot springs, continental philosophy (Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche but NOT Hegel), black beans, backpacking and champagne.

I have settled in 419 soda, but often lurk around 421.

Curriculum Vitae


Publications:



Talks:


Teaching


Last Spring (09), I TAd CS186 - Introduction to Database Systems with Kuang Chen.

Dioramae & c.


Radlab retreat, June 2009: What the Thunder Said