Dual-stack mechanical engineer and systems administrator. Equal parts cynic and hippie, plus a soupçon of high-functioning idiosyncrasies (like making sure I had the right diacritical marks for “soupçon”, or creating a single set of LaTeX files that could create either a printed dissertation or the defense presentation slides).
Since 2017, I’m the High Performance Computing Systems Administrator in Information Technology Services at Tennessee Tech University. When I’m not doing literal HPC work, I’m either doing Linux configuration management and orchestration or research facilitation (what the fancy people call an ACI-REF).
From 2000–2017, I was a Research and Development Engineer in the Center for Manufacturing Research at Tennessee Tech University. Part of that time was spent breaking other people’s stuff, another part was all things applications engineering, and the last part was helping manage Tennessee Tech’s Computer Aided Engineering network.
From 2008–2018, I worked on (and finally completed) my Engineering PhD under Dr. Chris Wilson studying elastic-plastic fracture mechanics. There are few sounds worse than the “tink” of your fixture breaking instead of your specimen, and that’s (part of) how I ended up doing a purely numerical dissertation.
Since 2000, I’ve volunteered for FIRST LEGO League‘s East Tennessee Regional Championship Tournament. I’ve been refereeing there since 2007, and head referee since 2017.
I commute by bicycle on any day that’s not a grievous hazard to my health, and my hobbies alternate among video games (PS4 and PC), Python, and various maker-ish projects that don’t require a ton of specialty tools. Sometimes there are overlaps between those.