Currently I am living in New York City, pursuing my PhD in computer science at Columbia University and working occassionally as an IT consultant to some firms here in the city. I wouldn't say I "love" New York (after all, I'm a Red Sox fan), but it's close to where my family lives and, hey, there's always something going on. It's been a pretty long path to get here, though...

Birthdate: July 14, 1973, in Bridgeport CT. We moved to Milford CT when I was young, where I lived the stereotypical 80s suburban life: mom, dad, brother, two car garage, pet dog, soccer practice, private high school. Nothing particularly interesting.

I was a bit of a nerd in high school (to put it mildly) and so desperately wanted to get out of suburbia. I started my college career at Columbia Univ, but discovered that living in New York City didn't quite agree with me. Neither did college life, I guess. So after my freshman year I transferred to Boston University, where I graduated in 1995 with a degree in Computer Engineering. As with most people, my time as an undergraduate really shaped my future interests. It was during this time that I developed an affinity for the things I still love today: Guinness (my very first beer), grunge rock (this was the early 90s, remember), the Patriots (mostly because of Drew Bledsoe), and travel (I lived in Wales for four months for an internship).

Well, talk about being in the right place at the right time! I never really had a "passion" for computers but I thought it was an interesting field and I knew I could get a good job. After working for Digital Equipment Corp (now deceased) for a year, I joined a small internet software start-up called ATG (Art Technology Group) in 1996. To be honest, I wasn't even sure what they did when I first started working there. I knew they were doing some Java-based internet stuff, and they seemed reasonably cool and in a good location in downtown Boston.

When I joined ATG, they were about 40 people. At its peak, they were about 2000 people, and right in the middle of the internet boom. I was at ATG for four years, and it was an amazing ride. I moved to San Francisco in 1998 to open the West Coast office, and then moved to London a year later to help establish the European presence. I learned a lot, met a lot of great people, and worked on some fantastic projects.

While living in London, I decided it was time to try to progress my career a bit further. In November 2000 I joined IconMedialab, a Swedish company that had an office in London and was poised to be a major contender in the systems integration market. From the time I accepted the job to the time I started, it took about seven weeks to get a new work permit; in that time, everything went horribly wrong at IconMedialab. Some contracts fell through, key figures left the company, and projects fell dreadfully behind schedule. The company I ended up joining was not at all the one I had interviewed at.

One reason I stayed was that it presented me the opportunity to become CTO (Chief Technology Officer), which was the next logical step in my career. That is where I wanted to be and I saw the possibility. However, once I assumed the CTO role, my first task was to lay off six people. Welcome to the internet world in 2001. My employees were miserable and I was working way, way, too hard. After only three months as CTO, I resigned.

For six years I had been working very hard, travelling and living the high-tech good life. I was a paper millionaire at one point and even though my stock wasn't worth what it had been a year or two earlier, I figured I had a good amount of money to play with for a long time to come. After a three-week trip to America to visit friends and family, I returned to London in the summer of 2001 ready to find a new job.

What happened next changed my life for the better. I was living with my girlfriend at the time, and though things had been stressful between us while I was working a job I didn't really like, I knew that things would start to improve. And then she broke up with me. I think I took it surprisingly well. I was sad, of course, but we both knew it had to happen eventually. With no job, no girlfriend, and no place to live, I decided that my time in London had come to an end, and I moved back to America to regroup and figure out what to do next.

You could then add "no money" to that list. I hadn't quite gotten around to doing my taxes for 2000, and in August 2001 I learned the hard truth about capital gains and alternative minimum tax and all that stuff to the tune of a six-digit tax bill. Ouch. That tax bill wiped out just about all of the money I had made from ATG stock, save a little bit that was still invested. Dreams of early retirement were by then a distant memory; but it was really painful to realize that suddenly was I not only not rich anymore, but I had about the same amount of money as I did when I graduated college!

One thing that I had promised myself that I would do with this "time off" was travel. Since entering the workforce, I had discovered that I loved to travel, and took many business trips as excuses to see America and to see Europe. There were three places I really wanted to see: South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. And over the next six months I visited all of them. That was certainly the most rewarding period of time that I can remember.

Upon returning from NZ, I found myself once again wondering what to do next. I didn't really have enough money left to do any more significant travel and I was kind of hanging around doing nothing, when a friend told me that The Princeton Review was looking for teachers for the summer in Korea. I had never been to Asia before and I do like to teach, so I figured three months of teaching in Asia would be a great experience and a way to earn a little cash.

Well, two years after that conversation, I was still living in Korea! I ended up staying for about 27 months in total, and it was such an amazing experience. Check out my website for lots of photos and stories about my time there. There's too much to explain here, but that was definitely a life-altering experience. I gained a much better appreciation for what it means to be American, and learned so much about myself and about Korea, of course.

While living in Korea and being in an educational environment as a teacher, I decided that I wanted to be a university professor and that returning to grad school to pursue a Masters and eventually a PhD would be the way to go. So, I figured it would be best to combine two things that I both like and am good at: computer science and teaching. I started my MS at Columbia in fall 2004, and then transferred into the PhD program in spring 2006. After graduation, I intend to start teaching right away, though you never know what will happen, right?

The other major life-altering thing that happened in Korea is that I met my wife, Ina. When I moved to New York, she moved to Chicago to pursue her Masters in Art Administration at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, so we did the "long distance" thing for two years. But after we both finished our Masters, we had a wedding ceremony in New York on May 12, 2006, and then one in Seoul on July 27.

Well, if you've made it this far, you probably learned a lot more about me than you really care to, but I hope you enjoy the rest of the site...