Short Autobiograpy
Although I have lived in California and Illinois for brief periods, I
mainly grew up in Rhode Island, where I attended
Ponaganset High
School. I was very active in sports there especially football and
wrestling.
After high school, I attended Brigham Young University in Utah, where I originally intended to study Physics and Computer Science. After one year there, I decided to serve a two year LDS mission and was called to serve in the Tokyo South mission. While there, I learned to speak Japanese and I also learned a great deal about Japanese culture and customs. After my mission I returned to BYU and graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science.
Upon graduation I worked for five years in the software industry mainly for Rigaku/MSC, a Japanese company that specializes in X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence instruments. I was fortunate to be able to spend seven months working in Osaka Japan for them. I also spent some time working for the company that is now called Omniture. During this time I met and married my lovely wife Jennifer and we now have a four year old daughter, Ashley.
Recently, we decided I should return to school to earn a Ph.D. Currently, I am an undergraduate student of Physics at the University of Utah. I plan to attend graduate school to earn a Ph.D. in Mathematics after graduation.
Current Research
I am working with Dr. Paolo Gondolo on a project where we hope to determine the amount dark matter in the Sagittarius tidal stream. We are using a numerical simulation of the motion of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy in orbit around the Milky Way to try to achieve this. If we are able to match our model with the observed orbital data that is available, we will then know more about how dark matter is distributed around our galaxy.
If you are interested in trying the N-body code I have written to perform this simulation, you can find it at my Kaliope page. I am releasing the code under the GPL (GNU General Public License).