About Me

I'm a chemistry PhD with a wonderful wife and two cute cats. I grew up in east TN, close to Chattanooga. I went to UTK for undergrad, getting a chemistry major and a business minor, then came to Ole Miss to get a PhD with Dr. Davita Watkins. My research background has been a little all over the place, starting in bioinformatics and moving into semiconductors and biocompatible polymers, both with an emphasis on non-covalent interactions. I decided to take a scientific programming course during my second year of grad school, and got hooked on Python. After stumbling upon machine learning through my final project in this course, I started stocking my bookshelves with ML, software engineering, and math books. I eventually ended up at a small startup as a data scientist, where I was able to dive into a legacy codebase and gain real-world deployment and SQL experience. This cemented my desire to work with data, and made me realize how much I like to study the process behind data science, i.e. the pipeline that extends from data collection to product deployment. My wife and I love to play board games (Scythe is a personal favorite), travel, and go hiking/camping. When I'm not in lab, programming, or doing fun things with my wife, I enjoy gaming. StarCraft was my original favorite, which eventually gave way to DOTA, Hearthstone, and Overwatch. I tend to be very easy-going, and pride myself on being a good listener.