I am currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Augustana College. I earned my Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University, where I was a member of the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling. Following that I spent three years as an assistant professor of computer science and mathematics at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.
My research interests span a variety of topics, including agent-based modeling and multi-agent systems, evolutionary computation, dynamic processes on networks, emergence in complex systems, and computer science education. While investigating these topics, I have been involved in application areas from archeology to zoology. I have a particular passion for collaborative research with undergraduates.
I am equally dedicated to teaching, which I have loved since high school where I convinced the teachers to let me teach a course on computer programming to several other students. I'm always pushing my own boundaries, teaching new courses, trying new pedagogical methods, and learning from my colleagues. While at Northwestern, I worked on a grant-funded project developing an undergraduate course on agent-based modeling. At Centre, I recently participated in an inter-institutional grant from the Associated Colleges of the South, which focused on a critical exploration of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and their relation to small liberal arts colleges. If you're interested, I wrote a sequence of articles [1, 2, 3] on the group project blog. I have also published exploratory ideas about designing an introductory computer science curriculum with a multi-agent systems theme.
I enjoy interdisciplinary challenges and aspire to be a renaissance computer scientist, teacher, and scholar.