The Fam👨‍👦‍👧‍👩‍👧‍👦

Born and raised in Colorado, I am the oldest of four siblings. We have two dogs, Daisy and Stubby, and a couple of chickens in the coop in our backyard. My mom is a school nurse and my dad is a contractor and a commercial fisherman in the summer. My youngest sister Maggie, a.k.a. GG, is a crazy good horseback rider who does all sorts of stunts with the Westernaires.

Since 2016 I have travelled to Alaska each summer to commercially fish for sockeye salmon 🐟. My dad runs his own boat, The High Flyer, a 32-foot aluminum bow-picker, in the Nushagak River just above the Aleutian Island chain. In the picture, Vince, my younger brother, and I have just finished setting out the 300-yard gillnet. Commercial fishing in Alaska has been a great experience for me, as it taught me how rewarding hard work can be (It also helped that it paid my college tuition off!). However, now that I have graduated, my time on the boat has come to an end, and my younger sister Natalie has already replaced me 😢!

My Journey in Computer Science👨‍💻

When I started my degree in Computer Science at Regis University. All I really wanted was to make Minecraft mods and only went to school based on my parents' advice. After getting past the introductory courses, my interest was piqued while taking classes like computational theory, operating systems, and paradigms of programming languages.

Realizing Regis's Computer Science department was limited by its size, I transferred to CU Boulder to gain access to a greater variety of courses and teaching experience. At CU I took introductory courses in quantum computing, robotics, cyber-security, and bio-networking. However, I enjoyed system administration and data center computing the most because they involved problem solving and managing systems at a massive scale(Simply put [Super Computers == cool] evaluates to True).

During my senior year at CU, I worked with FESTO and senior project team to develop a software based system for generating unique ids for a specific device based on irreplicable defects in the device's memory. The idea was to pull initialized binary values from the device's memory on startup and plug them into a Physically Unclonable Function(PUF) in order to generate a unique id which could only be generated by the given device. Then it would send the id to a web based Solidity contract where a business or organization could grant the device access to their service(s) or system(s). I learned a lot about planning and building, and then re-planning when everything went wrong🔥📉🤔.

Most recently, I interned with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory through the SULI program. I worked within the Power Systems Engineering Center to help develop a LLM for analyzing power system questions a utility company may face and assist the utility operators in addressing the problem. My mentor, Rishab Jain, and I focused on developing an multi-agent AI system where each AI agent was an expert in a specific domain, such as system maintenance, cost analysis, and human comfort. The expert agents then would bounce ideas off each other in an attempt to build a more robust and thought out solution.

Interests🎮⛷️🍝

I love video games, especially FPS like Valorant, Tarkov, and Arma; however, I also have enjoyed playing various adventure and story games like Cities: Skylines, It Takes Two, and STAR WARS Jedi: Fallen Order. It's always fun to hop on an play with friends and kick some ass (but we lose a lot 😔).

My other interests include building LEGOs, skiing with the fam, watching movies with friends, and eating pretty much anything(but especially Italian food).