I am a Ph. D. student at the University of Minnesota. I received my B.A. in computer science and math from Luther College, a small liberal arts college in northeast Iowa. I feel that my liberal arts background helps me have a well-rounded perspective on computer science.

My current research is in online communities, specifically dealing with guild retention in World of Warcraft (WoW). I am also interested in tagging and recommender systems.

Since 2006, I have also been an active contractor and freelancer. In my freelancing I concentrate on web-based projects, building various e-commerce solutions and web- based business applications. I make sites functional and work well with designers to bring their vision to life. I mostly work with PHP, Python, and MySQL. I’ve also completed projects in ASP and ASP.Net.

As a contractor I’ve worked in the medical device field building various database solutions to support device development and the devices themselves, working mostly in Java with a mix of MS-SQL, MySQL, and Oracle.