I grew up in the mountains of NC, in Asheville. In 1998 I graduated from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, in Durham, NC. I then did my undergraduate work at NC State University, where I received Bachelors of Science in Computer Science and Applied Math working under Dr. Carla Savage, and a Minor in Music with an emphasis in Vocal Performance. In May of 2004 I completed a Master of Science in Computer Science at Duke University with Dr. Amin Vahdat. Since then I have continued my PhD work with Dr. Amin Vahdat at the University of California, San Diego, Department of Computer Science, in Systems and Networking. When I'm not working on research, I volunteer as a CPR/First Aid instructor for the Red Cross, sing in local groups, and spend time with my wife Kristina.

Mace: My present research is in tools to help develop and test distributed systems. We have developed Mace, a C++ language extension for building distributed systems, and a model checker to test liveness properties of systems built in Mace. We have also built a variety of systems using Mace, including file transfer (like BitTorrent), DHT, directory synchronization, streaming multicast, and network coding.

Prior to my work in distributed systems, I did work in the areas of Gray codes and Venn diagrams. Together with Dr. Carla Savage, I proved the existance of symmetric Venn diagrams for all prime numbers of curves. The basis of the proof is a necklace approach to constructing an embedding of the boolean lattice, and then taking its dual. The work appeared in the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, and was featured in December 2006 issue of the Notices of the AMS.