My partner in crime is Charles Romero, a sub-millimeter astronomer (though he calls it 90 GHz astronomy), who studies the absorption and scattering of CMB photons by hot-mess gas in massive galaxy clusters using MUSTANG on the GBT. Charles defended his Ph.D. in Summer 2015 and was a postdoc with the NIKA2 instrument at the IRAM 30meter telescope in Grenoble, France and then returned to the US to work with MUSTANG2 on the GBT both at the University of Pennsylvania in the Devlin Instrumentation Lab and at the Green Bank Observatory.
We like to do things outside and Charles likes to write about them here on wordpress. I take pictures of the things we do, but am woefully behind in my photo-editing. My public photo repository is on Flickr. My more instantaneous photo life is on Instagram, but is mostly pictures of my dog Nora.
I grew up on a plant nursery in Southern Virginia surrounded by a wonderfully large and complex extended family. I attended a tiny public school in a town so small my grandmother knew my grades before I did (and it helped she is a former teacher and had spies everywhere!). My parents founded their own business in that town in 1978 -- right next door to the business my grandpa founded many years earlier. My other grandpa was one of the first doctors to break through racial barriers in our little corner of the South -- and refused to not treat the people that needed it. I am fortunate to have had such inspirational individuals empower me from a young age.
I have been a band geek since I started piano at age 7. I was a founding member of the Cavalier Marching Band in 2004 and a re-founding father and two time President of the Beta Chi chapter of Kappa Kappa Psi -- where the chapter award for academic achievement is given in my honor (one of the things I am most proud of). I helped to form and guide the early years of the Cavalier Marching Band Alumni Association. I am on hiatus from band-nerdom, but will one day dust of my instruments and play again.