My hometown is back in Naperville in the suburbs of Chicago. There, I fostered an interest in computers, and after I built my first one, I wanted to find out more about how computers work. I decided to pursue this interest at UC Berkeley, where I studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS).
In my first semester at Cal, I took a Signals and Systems course from Professor Edward Lee, and I was immediately hooked. I continued taking classes in the signals/communications path and decided to pursue my Ph.D. in the topic at UC San Diego, where I am today. Along the way, I have worked in video processing at Intel over two summers and took a fellowship at the Universitaria Politechnica de Madrid to study channel behavior of wireless over video. I have also worked off and on at Lockheed Martin on various projects since 2008, including a project where I designed a scalable turbo decoding architecture.
Outside of work and school, I like to spend my time volunteering, playing basketball, and playing chess. I worked for 2.5 years at the Kearny High Educational Complex in San Diego, helping out kids with math in the classroom. For my work, I was given a Volunteer of the Month award as well as a Volunteer of the Year nomination in San Diego.
