In addition to my recent interests in security, I have long been interested in storage. My graduate research investigated issues involving OS-level access to secondary storage: disks, disk arrays, and new disk-like technologies. For details, see my publications on MEMS-based storage, track-aligned extents, and timing-accurate storage emulation; if you're really into this stuff, my dissertation advocates an emulation-based approach for storage component evaluations. In general, I am in the class of people who refer to themselves as "systems" folks. I enjoy finding small and efficient solutions to big problems involving the interactions between software and hardware.

I did my graduate work in computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon (Ph.D., 2004; M.S., 2000) and my undergraduate at Auburn University (B.C.E., 1998). This raises the interesting coincidence that I both root for Big Blue (Auburn) and work for Big Blue (IBM). As a graduate student I studied under Dr. Greg Ganger with an unparalleled set of colleagues at the Parallel Data Laboratory. During the summer of 2001 I worked as an intern with Dr. Elizabeth Shriver at Bell Labs.