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Profession
I'm currently a senior member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I work in the area of human reliability analysis, primarily to ensure safer control room operations at nuclear power plants. I worked in a similar capacity for five years at Idaho National Laboratory and for one year as a visiting scientist at Halden Reactor Project. During my graduate studies, I interned in usability at Microsoft and Expedia corporations.
Research Interests
My primary interest is applied cognitive research, with an emphasis on human reliability analysis and human factors for control rooms. For my Bachelor's degree, I investigated the effects of international students' psychological acculturation on their language learning. For my Master's degree, I studied the cognitive factors affecting essay grading and compared human essay grading with a novel computerized essay grading system. During my PhD, my research centered around cognitive issues of human-computer interaction, with experiments ranging from attentional factors in information display, to factors affecting quality judgments of streaming video, to methods to enhance user satisfaction ratings in usability tests. A list of hopelessly out-of-date but relatively recent publications can be found here.
Background
Originally, I studied Psychology and German for my Bachelor's degree at the University of Montana. After a two-year hiatus as a Fulbright Scholar at the Universität Heidelberg in Germany, I continued my studies at New Mexico State University in the MA program in Experimental Psychology under the tutelage of Professor Peter Foltz. I eventually decided to pursue my PhD with Professor Robert West at the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University as a way of bridging my interests in computer science and psychology, particularly as these subjects pertained to human-computer interaction. At Carleton University, I was particularly closely affiliated with the Human Oriented Technology Laboratory (HOT Lab).
Family
I'm happily married to my wife, Wendy. This summer we marked our tenth wedding anniversary. We have two children, a 7-year-old boy named Elliott and a 4-year-old girl named Maggie Kate. We also have two cats, who generously consent to the affections of our children.