(from left to right) Me, Taco, and Scott right after my doctoral defense in Delft.
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I was born and raised in Macomb, IL. My parents, Jack and Sue, still live there, working at Western Illinois University. I have an older sister, Casey, and a younger brother, Brett. I attended St. Paul Catholic School from kindergarten through sixth grade, then Macomb Jr.-Sr. High School through graduation. While in high school, I ran varsity track and cross country and played intramural basketball. I was also a ICTM Math Competition state champion and a member of the Scholastic Bowl.
In the fall of 2000, I enrolled in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Illinois (UIUC). During my summers, I interned in the CDMA Systems Group at Motorola in Arlington Heights, IL. I performed system-wide and board-level testing of a number of base station products. I also spent one school year interning at the Motorola facility in Champaign software testing cell phones.
I began my graduate studies in ECE at UIUC in the summer of 2004 under Prof. P. Scott Carney. In my first year, I applied for, and won, a Fulbright
Scholarship to study with Prof. Taco Visser at the Vrije Universiteit (Free University). I spent nine months in the 2005-2006 school year studying singular optics
under Prof. Visser. When I came back, I began dual tracks of study - one under Prof. Carney and one under Prof. Visser. Both tracks have been productive, as I have
already
received a Ph.D under Prof. Visser (now at TU Delft) and will be completing my Ph.D with Prof. Carney very soon. It was also during graduate school that I began dating, and then married, Katrina Thomas.
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