I am originally from San Diego, CA.  In 1994 I reported to West Point, beginning both my undergraduate education in mechanical engineering and my career in the Army.  In 2007, after 9 years as an Army Engineer officer and several deployments, I became an Army Operations Research/Systems Analyst (ORSA).

I received a Master of Science in Operations Research from MIT in 2009 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Operations Research in 2017.  My master’s advisor was Cynthia Barnhart and my doctoral advisor was Tauhid Zaman.  They are both outstanding role models as well as academic advisors.

For my master’s degree, I conducted research on using approximate dynamic programming to efficiently finding high-payoff routes for counter-IED patrols.  For my doctoral research, I worked on finding efficient, and in some cases provably optimal methods for network search, with a focus on finding specific users in an online social network or classifying large sets of users in social networks.  This work has interesting and exciting applications in identifying and countering online extremism and targeted sentiment analysis.

I am currently working again in the Army as an Operations Research/Systems Analysts.  I’m currently assigned to US Southern Command in Doral, Florida.  I lead a small team of analysts generally tasked to conduct data analyses to inform strategic and operational decisions in the command.

My advice to students coming to the ORC is to believe in your ability to solve hard problems.  I think the work load and the research is hard for everybody, but you can do it if you apply yourself.  The faculty and your fellow students are amazing resources when you are struggling with something, and the libraries can be very helpful as well.  I recommend the ORC because it has a high standard of academic rigor, while still offering students a very broad set of research topics.  I think this is one reason why the ORC faculty is so diverse–there are people working on so many different things.

My time in the ORC helped me realize what I am capable of accomplishing.  I have learned to think in terms of what might be analytically possible, and I can start visualizing methods to achieve those possibilities.  

It is hard to think of a single memory about the ORC–I have so many!  It amuses me to consider the time when we were all studying so hard for qualification exams.  We got together in different groups many times and worked into the evening.  It was a funny way to get to know each other: everybody stuck on the same set of seemingly impossible study problems.  It was also a good way to learn that we could all benefit from each other’s talents.