About

I’m a software and machine-learning engineer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. I currently work for xD, a small team within the United States Census Bureau focused on using new and emerging technologies to improve government services. I am also a core team member of OpenMined, where I volunteer my time to help build open-source tools to enable privacy-preserving machine learning and data science.

Prior to joining xD I worked with a government contracting firm at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View. At NASA I contributed to a variety of aerospace projects as part of the Simulation Laboratories (SimLabs) organization, most notably on the Air Traffic Management-eXploration (ATM-X) research project where I helped build a software platform and web application for exploring methods to integrate drones and air taxis into existing air traffic control infrastructure.

Before NASA I worked at several Bay Area startups including Mode (acquired by ThoughtSpot in 2023), a web platform for data science teams, and Ayasdi (acquired by SymphonyAI in 2019), a platform that combined traditional machine learning approaches with topological data analysis (TDA).

I’ve made a few pivots in my career via coding bootcamps and online learning. I picked up my machine learning and data science skills thanks to Springboard’s machine learning engineering program. Several years before that I was in one of the first cohorts of the coding bootcamp Hack Reactor, which enabled my transition into web development. Prior to Hack Reactor I worked as a data analyst and field engineer for the energy consulting firm DNV for several years. I originally moved to Northern California after completing undergraduate degrees in physics and math from the University of North Texas. As a born-and-raised Texan in the Bay Area I like to refer to myself as a NorCal Texpat.🤠

Outside of my regular working hours and volunteer work with OpenMined, I enjoy writing posts for this website, experimenting with new programming languages and machine learning techniques, as well as learning all I can about cryptography and how to preserve privacy when it comes to the web and machine learning processes. My interest in these topics is what led me to join the OpenMined community and contribute to its various open-source projects.

In the non-digital realm my hobbies include reading all categories of books, especially fiction and history (recent favorites include "Homegoing" by Yaa Gyasi, The Expanse Series by James S.A. Corey, and "Nothing Left to Envy" by Barbara Demick), cooking, meditation, martial arts and personal fitness, and studying languages (previously: German and Spanish, recently: Urdu, continually: Japanese). I also enjoy traveling and my favorite travel experience so far was getting to live in a dojo in rural Japan for a summer while training in Aikido.