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...My philosophy
| I could go to a good engineering grad school for a few years, and get all the preparation necessary to go push around discrete Chebyshev filters or design the next generation of hyper-shrink SDRAMs. Then again, I could go stick pins in my kneecaps. | The occasional person has looked at my resume or heard me describe my academic philosophy and stated that I need to improve my focus. What these individuals don't understand is that my education has been nothing but focussed; I've carefully designed it to give me the best background possible to allow me to work in fields that do not yet exist. My goal is not to make incremental improvements in existing technologies. It is to invent new ones. I want to be involved when the next generation's world is designed. |
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Nascent fields I am scoping include cybernetics, neuromorphic engineering, and biomimetics. Programs I am scoping include the Media Lab and the Computational and Neural Systems program at Caltech. It is my very strong belief that innovative advances in science and technology require a broad approach that integrates information from multiple fields. Research focussed at the heart of established tech produces plodding, incremental advances. An important type of research, but it's not my style. |
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...Education at Swarthmore....
At Swat, Engineering and biology are taught as liberal arts. I've been studying Electrical, Mechanical and Computer Engineering, and Molecular, Micro, Organismal and Population Biology. In addition to my coursework, I put much work into administering the UNIX server which is sending you these pages. The most wonderful aspect of a Swarthmore education in the sciences is the intense level of practical experience we receive. Every course in the sciences at Swat has a lab (even my "statistics for engineers" course had a lab); almost every one of them, including introductory courses, include independant research projects which are proposed, designed and reported in the same fashion as graduate or postdoc university research. Over the last five years, I've done quite a number of these. If you're interested (or if you are someone involved in graduate school admissions), please take a look at my research page.
Recent coursework has included a couple of semesters of neurobiology with Dr. Kathleen Siwicki, Materials Science with Dr. Frederick Orthlieb, Computer Graphics with Silvio Eberhardt, and a seminar in Biomechanics with Dr. Rachel Merz. For my neurobiology seminar I conducted a research project with another student, Sarah Wise '96 concerning the ability of 24-hour Brachydanio rerio (zebrafish) embryos to regenerate lateral line primordia. For the materials course, I conducted a research project titled "Examination of the Magnetorheological Properties of Commercial Ferrofluids", and recieved an award in an IEEE writing contest for the paper. In Biomechanics, I conducted research on the phenotypic plasticity of sunflowers in response to mechanical loading conditions during development. In addition, I have taken courses in , Control Theory, Systematic Botany, Discrete-Time Systems, Evolution, Microbiology, Acoustics, and a host of other great subjects...Things I've studied...