I graduated from high school in 1996 and immediately began working at Walter's Texaco, pumping gas and learning to work on cars. 

In 2000, I left Pittsburgh and moved to Northampton, MA to begin my undergraduate studies at Hampshire College. My Bachelors Thesis was on the ATLAS experiment (CERN), working at Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, outside Rome, Italy. 

After graduating from Hampshire in 2004, I moved to Long Island, NY for graduate school at Stony Brook University.  I completed my MA in 2006 and my PhD in 2012 in nuclear particle physics working for the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. My thesis was titled A Search for Charm and Beauty in a Very Strange World and explored e⁺e^- pairs created in d+Au collisions.

After studying neutral pion production in p+p and p+Pb collisions with the ALICE experiment for 3 years, my current research investigates heavy flavor production with the CMS detector (LHC) at CERN in Geneva Switzerland. I live in the foothills of the Alps and, between work and the mountains, clearly don't spend much time updating my website.