About

I have many interests, mostly centered around science, computing, the academic life, and Christian thought. I am currently living in the Boston area, doing postdoctoral research in the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles directorate.

Science

My educational background is in Physical Chemistry. I earned my Ph.D from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2009. My dissertation was on the use of cavity ring-down spectroscopy to probe the orientation of molecular actuators adsorbed to a surface.

Computing

I’m a big fan of Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) and use Linux extensively. From late 2005 to late 2009 I was involved with the development of the Ubuntu Linux operating system. I did a variety of things like write documentation, create and maintain software packages, teach new contributors, and promote growth of the development community. I was also involved with the educational version of Ubuntu called Edubuntu and for 2008 and most of 2009 was the leader of that project. I also try to contribute to the Debian GNU/Linux project, specifically with the chemistry group called Debichem.

Lately I have become less interested in operating system development and more interested in application development. I have contributed patches to Avogadro (3D molecular editor/visualizer) and GChemUtils (chemistry software library/suite) and have become the lead developer of Plotdrop (graphical frontend for the gnuplot plotting program).

Science & Faith

The intersection of science and faith is a major interest of mine. Being both a chemist and an evangelical Christian has led to lots of investigation at the interface of science and religion as well as a lot of intellectual challenges. I am interested in the epistemological bounds of science as a way of knowing and how Christians should properly view science from an orthodox/evangelical world view. Can modern science and conservative evangelical Christianity coexist in harmony (or near harmony) or are they mutually exclusive? How should Christians view the Bible, it’s authority and historicity, as well as God’s involvement in creation?

About the Site

This site was created using the Python site generator Hyde and is based heavily on Steve Losh’s open-sourced website. You can check out the code ourself.