I was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan where I attended the local Community High School. I pursued an undergraduate degree in linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. 

During that degree I interned twice at the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, California, and wrote my undergraduate dissertation on a translation algorithm I designed for Long Now's panlingual lexical translation database, PanLex. It was during this period that I first became interested in ontologies and graph databases, and I owe to Long Now my interest in this career path. 

Subsequently, I worked with the computational linguistics lab "Sanskrit Research Institute" in Kuilapalayam in Tamil Nadu where I supervised the digitization of a knowledge organization system for Sanskrit Literature called the "New Catalogus Catalogorum" in collaboration with the University of Madras. 

Following this, I worked as a Data Labeling Linguist for Scale AI in San Fransisco, California, working in collaboration with OpenAI to label and summarize their training data. 

I then went back to school to pursue a masters degree in Information Science at City, University of London, in England. During this period I worked on problems relating to the visualization of ontologies and knowledge graphs. I then proceeded to a PhD in Information Science at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University of Ontario in London, Ontario. 

While at Western I began to work with Melissa Adler on works of art to visualize knowledge organization systems, and Kamran Sedig at the Insight Lab at Western on information visualization more technically. 

Parallel to this career, I began to dream of creating a language similar to the philosophical languages of George Dalgarno, John Wilkins, and the ideas of Bacon, Comenius and Leibniz, as well as the Renaissance Hieroglyphic tradition. This idea emerged naturally from my own research questions in linguistic semantics during my undergraduate studies. Originally I wanted a way to add pictograms to First Order Logic as arguments. As I pursued these thought experiments, I realized that this idea (which I had arrived at independently) had a long history, and I began to study this history to situate my artworks (my ideal language and visualization prototypes) in the stream of this history. 

I have always been a passionate reader of history, and my works, such as my novel Aretalogy, have often dealt with historical concerns. I believe that scholars have a duty to the world to be itinerant, and thus I endeavored to travel widely during my intellectually formative years, although in practice I lived within the English speaking world. In my private life I love literature, collecting books, spending time in the natural world, cooking, and learning about plant knowledge from traditional knowledge keepers from many cultures around the world. I am also an activist, having worked in the past for Greenpeace in California, and have been involved in labour politics in the Public Service Alliance of Canada in Ontario. 

If you are having trouble reaching me by email, I may be in a remote location where internet is sparse. I have many concerns which take me to such places outside of the academic year.