About Me
I am originally from southwestern Illinois, a short distance from Saint Louis. I attended Southwestern Illinois College, Illinois State University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I received my Ph.D. in mathematics in August 2015, with Alexandr Kostochka as my advisor. At ISU I divided my time between pure mathematics and actuarial science, and had an actuarial internship with Country Financial before eventually deciding that I prefer pure math (research and teaching). At the beginning of my time at UIUC, I considered research areas in algebra (especially categorical), topology, and geometric group theory before choosing combinatorics. I held a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at Ryerson University, with mentors Anthony Bonato and Paweł Prałat, then a two-year visiting assistant professorship at Illinois Tech. I now work as a data scientist at Enova, a fintech company.
My wife has her degree in art, with a particular focus on puppetry. She has also spent several years working in early childhood development.
I enjoy the outdoors, particularly in the fall. I play tennis when I can. I was once very involved in theater and would like to pick that up again. I have been brewing my own beer, wine, mead, and whatever else I can ferment since the summer of 2007; my brewing equipment steadily grows to take up more space. I have a motorcycle, a Honda VTX. I enjoy chess and especially chess variants (see my Links page). I am a volunteer editor for The Chess Variant Pages.
- MathSciNet profile (requires subscription)
- Mathematics Genealogy Project entry
- thesis in IDEALS