I'm a Michigander living in the Los Angeles area. My journey into data science was winding. In my undergraduate degree, I studied medical anthropology and spent most of my time writing poetry and fiction. During that time, I worked as a writing tutor and as a substitute teacher.

I started my public health career after the Great Recession. I served in AmeriCorps for two years, working at federally-qualified health centers in Michigan and New York City. There, I got a taste for working with health data. While living in Brooklyn and working at the Institute for Family Health, I completed a Masters of Public Health degree, focusing on epidemiology and biostatistics.

It was when I moved to Los Angeles to start my Ph.D. that I got particularly interested in R. Now, I spend a lot of my time contributing to open-source software, supporting community R events in Southern California, and working as a data scientist. I love my wife and my cats, as well as many other things, like kung fu, tai chi, yoga, reading and writing poetry, and the cats of other people. I spend a lot of my time at the Zen Center of New York City and Zen Mountain Monastery.

The photographs on this website were taken by me unless otherwise noted.