In 2003 I moved to Chicago for my undergraduate time at the Illinois Institute of Technology. I absolutely love Chicago and the great friends and professors that I met during my time in the applied mathematics department.

During my undergraduate time, I was also fortunate enough to participate in a summer research project in Hong Kong, which sparked in my a permanent love of the city and the wonderful people living there. This picture was taken during that summer (back when I still had dark hair) and includes amazing people such as Ray Chan, Michael Ng, Graeme Fairweather and Gene Golub.

I did grad school at Cornell University in applied math in 2007 under under Charlie Van Loan; Dr. Van Loan taught me a lot, though I did not always understand it at the time. As part of my Ph. D. research, I worked at Argonne National Labs with Lois Curfman McInnes and Hong Zhang.

This picture was taken while I was at a conference presenting my thesis work, but it is much cooler than me standing in front of a poster.

After graduate school, I spent some postdoc time split between the University of Colorado and 北京国际学院. This was a wonderful opportunity during which I wrote a book on kernel methods with the incomparable Greg Fasshauer.

The picture to the left is fully unrelated, but is a cool picture of my brother and I from back in the day, so it goes here.

Midway through 2015, I decided to become an AI expert (by calling myself an AI expert) and joined a San Francisco-based company called SigOpt. I spend 6 wonderful years with that company, growing from just 4 of us to 24 prior to an acquisition by Intel in 2020.

My time at SigOpt was an extraordinary time, including a lot of learning and a lot of great relationships. I have more pictures than I can count of my time there, but I want to emphasize in this picture that we were also sponsoring conferences. And I thought that was awesome.

During COVID, I moved to the wonderful city of Honolulu, where I was able to work remotely for Intel on research projects and leading SigOpt within Intel. I cannot thank the community in Honolulu enough for welcoming me and providing me a calm perspective during a stressful time in my life.

This picture is a perfect encapsulation of my time with SigOpt. A solid group of former SigOpt team members came out to Honolulu during ICML in 2022 to celebrate the good times.

After leaving Intel, I was a co-founder and CTO at Distributional from 2023 to 2025, trying to figure out how to analyze and test GenAI systems.

As part of that position, I relocated to Toronto, where there was a hub of DBNL employees. This picture was our wonderful DBNL Toronto crew together at a Raptors game.

Despite no longer being with Distributional, I still live in Toronto and am considering my next move.