In life, as in science, it's hard to predict the future, but after it
unfolds
it's possible to see the patterns and the themes. My life is no
exception. I was born in Wichita Falls, Texas in 1960. Our family moved a
lot, so I grew up in a number of states: Texas, New Hampshire, Illinois,
and southern California.
My early interests included building things, but more likely, tearing them
apart to find out what was inside and what made them work. In high school
and college, I spent weekends and summers holding various "positions" such
as mechanic in a lawnmower shop and concrete finisher in a landscape
construction crew.
While these jobs were physically demanding, they did provide me with a lot
of time to think, and perhaps unexpectedly supplied my initial interest in
mathematics, experimental physics, and of course building things. I've
been building things ever since: first particle physics detectors, and now
distributed computing infrastructures and processing frameworks.
As an undergraduate student at the University of California, Riverside in
the early 1980s, there was a lot of excitement in the physics community as
this was the time when the W and Z bosons were discovered at CERN by the
UA1 experiment, which UCR helped build. There was lots of commotion and
energy on campus as camera crews and reporters visited the campus to
interview professors about these heavy boson things and why they were so
important.
Later, as graduate student at the University of Notre Dame, I got a taste
designing for discovery, as I worked with my thesis advisor Randy Ruchti
and others to build scintillating glass fiber targets for a fixed-target
charm experiment, E687, at Fermilab. I also discovered that I was pretty
good at data analysis, and developed a strong interest in Dalitz plot
fitting for charm meson decays.
When I moved to the University of Illinois as a postdoctoral research
associate, I had the chance to work with Prof. Jim Wiss who taught me most
of what I know about statistics and fitting while doing analysis of large
charm samples. As an assistant professor at Indiana University, I worked
with Prof. Alex
Dzierba on an exotic meson search experiment, RadPhi, at Jefferson Lab,
got interested in heavy quarks again, and designed the initial straw
chamber tracking system for a b-physics experiment at the Tevatron
(so-long, BTeV). It was around this time that I was introduced to the
ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Currently, I hold a joint appointment in the Computation and Enrico Femi Instutites at the University of Chicago, and work in various capacities on
distributed (Grid) computing research for high energy physics. I'll tell
you more about my work in the diaries, as well as my interests in urban
architecture, especially in downtown Chicago where I live.
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