"I never thought I'd work outside of academic research. But Defyned was too great to pass up. A brilliant team doing something completely new."

"Don't worry about anything... Go out and have a good time." - Richard Feynman

Being from a family of professors and schoolteachers, learning and teaching has always been a part of my life. I knew for the longest time I wanted a a Ph.D. but wasn't positive in what. It became clear as I programmed more and more from middle school on that Computer Science was it. And now I'm lucky enough to be pursuing that goal at IIT with an advisor who is an expert in parallel programming and information retrieval.

I've been fascinated with functional programming languages and the idea of, "the right tool for the job", which led me to learning Erlang. Erlang is a functional language that makes concurrent and distributed programming a breeze. When a fellow student in my lab, the IIT Information Retrieval Lab, called me saying Defyned was looking for an Erlang programmer I jumped at the oppurtunity. Following meeting Frank and the rest of the team I knew this was a group I had to be a part of.

As a free software advocate I'm a part of the Chicago GNU/Linux Users Group and as a high school student I was a member of my local Linux Users Group in South Carolina which led me to my first programming and sys admin jobs.

Away from programming and free software advocacy I'm an activist in Chicago for various causes. When not fighting for rights I'm probably brewing some homebrewed beer or enjoying a stout at a local pub.