Hi, my name's Kyle Christopher McDermott and this website is here to provide information about my education and work history for prospective employers (see also my LinkedIn Profile). As such it will only occasionally be updated or modified, however I will endeavor to keep my publications up-to-date here and on Google Scholar. The Course Materials section has syllabi and student evaluations for the courses I taught at UNR as well as some sample lecture slideshows. My curriculum vitae is here.
I've recently added an independent project aimed at serving as a kind of portfolio, generating a document called Visualizing Color Space. There is a corresponding GitHub repository here.
I find that browsing CVs leaves me wondering about the chronology of people's lives, so for the curious:
I was born and raised in Southern California and was fortunate enough to attend private schools. I took the rather drastic step of going to college on the other side of the country in Upstate New York, and while studying Engineering Physics (essentially Nuclear Engineering with less emphasis on reactors and more on the experimental side) I added a minor - which turned into a dual major - in Psychology with a focus on perception. Next I had the briefest of graduate careers at the UC Davis Applied Sciences program, not even finishing my first quarter (my undergraduate curriculum was not sufficient preparation and I had become disenchanted with nuclear fusion by that point).
I spent most of the interim before returning to graduate school as a security guard in an isolated golf course community near Lake Tahoe. I spent 8 (whole darn) years in the Cognitive & Brain Sciences graduate program of the Psychology department at UNR before being asked to kindly graduate already. My technical background made it easier for me to secure assistantship funding, but I blame the delay chiefly on their letting me teach so often. I developed most of my skills and filled out most of my bibliography during this time.
My first post-doc position was another drastic departure, spending a little over a year-and-a-half in Paris, France. I'm not a very good tourist, so other than living and working there I can't say I experienced much of the city or anywhere outside it. My second post-doc position was much closer to home, returning to UC Davis for barely over a year before I was stolen away from academia by a new tech start-up.
After four years working for Vizzario, Inc. in Southern California, not too far from my childhood home, like so many others the 2020 pandemic robbed me of my income and I have taken refuge with family in Southern Oregon. My hope is to find a new home in the Pacific Northwest.