I currently live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but I consider my hometown to be Seattle, Washington, and my home state to be Texas. Until graduating from high school, I lived just about everywhere (Dayton, Ohio; Louisiana; Texas; Mississippi; Panama City, Florida; near Kansas City, Kansas; Virginia, near Washington, DC; near Boston, Massachusetts; Montgomery, Alabama; near St. Louis, Illinois; Kaiserslautern, Germany - West Germany at the time; Del City, Oklahoma; Issaquah, Washington), averaging a move once every 2 years.

I did my undergraduate work in Seattle at the University of Washington, majoring in Music (with an emphasis in piano), and in Physics and Astronomy, earning B.A. and B.S. degrees in 1992. I spent a short while in 1992 as a graduate student at the University of Hawaii studying astronomy at the Institute for Astronomy. After deciding the life of an astronomer wasn't for me, I temporarily returned to more artistic fields, accompanying a branch of the Seattle Girls' Choir and also trying my hand at writing fiction. Then from June 1994 to March 1996, I was a graduate student at the University of Washington in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, receiving a M.Libr. degree in 1996. I now have a M.S. in Robotics (1998) from Carnegie Mellon University, and will soon have a Ph.D. in Robotics.

In my time here at CMU, I've gotten to do a lot of cool stuff, like traveling to conferences in New Mexico, Florida and the Netherlands, and doing field work in the Arctic and in Antarctica (as well as here in Pittsburgh). In the summer of 1997 I worked for Metrica, a robotics contractor at Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas. While there I worked on path planning algorithms for a 2-dimensional version of a space robot called AERCam. In the summer of 1995 I did fieldwork for 6 weeks at NASA's Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, during which time I determined that space robotics was the field in which to be, leading to my current position at CMU's Robotics Institute!

Other jobs I've held include a WWW assistant at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory and full-time pianist for Calvary Baptist Church in Renton, Washington, for about 8 years. I'm now playing the piano at Pittsburgh Baptist Church.

Sometimes I get asked what exactly is physics, or library science, or robotics, so here's a page that describes what it is that I've studied in my various majors.

I learned to fly while at CMU, at Allegheny County Airport, mostly in a Cessna 152 (a 2 seater, single engine plane). I soloed on August 28th, 1998, and got my private pilot's license in June of 1999. I can recommend learning at Pittsburgh Flight Training Center (466-1111), if you're in the area.

I am a Christian, and have been involved in my local church just about everywhere I've lived. (Here are some pictures of churches in a few of the more remote places I've been....) If you want to hear more about my beliefs, feel free to email me! Also, here's a web site that describes my general beliefs for the most part.

I am an aspiring writer (just a few poems published so far), and an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy . I like classical music (particularly piano music ), and some folk music and jazz. Other interests are astronomy, camping, cats, dogs , hiking, horses, Mariners baseball (though my favorite players have all left!), Mars, the Moon, skydiving (at least once!), space exploration , and Star Trek.

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