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. 

After graduating from Hampshire in 2004, I moved to Long Island, NY to attend graduate school at Stony Brook University.  I am currently working towards a PhD in nuclear particle physics.

My research includes working for the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, studying matter at its most fundamental level.