About

I grew up moving. Honduras, Kwajalein Atoll, Germany, and eventually Virginia. I learned to swim in the Pacific before I learned most other useful things, and I spent part of my childhood in a country that was, those years, ranked the most dangerous on earth. None of that felt remarkable at the time. It was just the address, and my parents were very calm about it.

What all that moving teaches you is that nobody is coming to introduce you. Every couple of years the context resets and you either walk up to strangers or you sit by yourself, and sitting by yourself gets old fast. So I walk up to strangers. It's the only skill I've been practicing since I was six, and most of the good things in my life have come out of it. A few years ago I did it on purpose and moved to Lisbon for three months without speaking Portuguese or knowing a single person there. I learned the language, built a friend group from nothing, and watched a World Cup match with half the city crammed into the Praça do Comércio. I've done that enough times now to know it isn't luck, and enough times to know the first three weeks are always lonely.

School went quickly. I finished high school at twelve and university at sixteen, which sounds like a story about being clever and is mostly a story about being impatient. I started working at fifteen, teaching people to code. By seventeen I was leading engineering projects for systems that people relied on to do their jobs every morning, which is a fast way to learn that shipping something is a promise and not an achievement.

Teaching is still the part I like best, and it has shaped how I work more than anything else. Explaining something to a person who is stuck is the quickest way to find out whether you understand it, and it puts you on their side of the table instead of across it. I've kept looking for that arrangement. On a team, it's the person who wants the whole thing to work and isn't precious about whose name is on it. Off the clock, it's the friend who shows up with a truck. If someone I know needs a hand, I would rather be the one who has it handled.

Courses I've TA'd at William & Mary:

• CSCI 141L – Intro to Programming Languages (Lab)
• CSCI 303 – Algorithms
• CSCI 304 – Computer Organization

And before that, at CodaKid, teaching:

• Scratch
• Java
• Python

I work in artificial intelligence. My research is on agentic systems, which is a technical way of saying software that decides things and then acts on those decisions. I care about the whole stack of it. What those systems are actually good for, how you make the models underneath them efficient enough to run at scale, and how you keep the whole arrangement secure once it's out in the world acting on someone's behalf. Those look like three problems and turn out to be one problem from three angles: how much freedom you can give a thing before it stops being safe, and how you would ever know you had crossed the line.

I'm a PhD candidate at William & Mary, and the work goes through peer review at venues like USENIX Security. Peer review mostly consists of strangers explaining why your idea is worse than you thought, and I've come to like it for that. It's also why I'm still in it while working full time. The interesting problems take years and don't care whether you're tired, and I've never left one early. My publications and writing are here.

I've published to venues like:

• FORGE
• USENIX
• ICSE (JAWS track)
• TSE/TOSEM (upcoming later this year)

Away from the desk, I play rugby, as flanker, which is a position for people who enjoy the parts of the game nobody applauds. I run and I lift. If there's a ridge, I'd like to be standing on it, so I've spent a fair number of weekends walking up to high places for no particular reason, and once caught a ride on an excavator across a city in Morocco because it was going the direction I needed.

There's one book I return to more often than is reasonable. City of Thieves, set during the siege of Leningrad, in which two young men are thrown together and sent across a starving city to find a dozen eggs. They have nothing in common. One talks constantly and the other barely at all, and the friendship that comes out of that absurd errand is the entire point of the book. I've found the same thing to be true well outside of wartime. The people worth knowing are almost never the ones you would have picked from a description.

The twenty minutes after you meet someone, once the conversation stops being polite, is still what I look forward to most.

That's most of it. I'm a cheerful person who says yes too often, and the best of what's happened to me came from being useful to somebody who needed it.

If any of this sounds interesting, say hello. Most of what I'm working through ends up on the writing page first.