I grew up in a rural area not far outside of Portland, Oregon. I attended a country grade school that had wheat fields on two sides of it. My family attended a small country church that was just a mile from the school. Later, I went to junior high and high school in a small town about 5 miles from home.

I began playing French Horn in fifth grade, and continued playing until well after graduating from college. As a senior in high school I was in the all-Oregon honor band, which included eight of the top horn players from throughout the state. While I went to a few music competitions over the years, I never had private lessons until I went to college.

I also began playing chess in fifth grade, and in eighth grade won my junior high championship. I won the high school championship all four years, and led the high school chess team to a second place tie at state chess team competition. While favored to win the individual competition at the state level I managed only a tie for second place. I played little chess in college, giving a simultaneous exhibition (in which I played some 15 concurrent opponents) while at Westmont College.

I played flag football in grade school, tackle football in junior high and for one year in high school. I joined the golf team as a junior in high school. In college I took up tennis, winning the tournament at the end of the course. I also learned fencing, winning the tournament at the end of that course as well.

I attended Westmont College and Stanford University, gaining a B.A. in Physical Science from Westmont and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Stanford. After working in industry for about 7 years I returned to college for a M.S. in Computer Engineering at Santa Clara University.

Since graduating from Stanford I have held some very interesting positions. I was a thin film engineer at Integrated Device Technology, which involved semiconductor wafer processing under very low pressure conditions. I also worked at SAIC on a fingerprint classification project in which two of us put together a system using artificial neural networks to classify fingerprints. Currently, I am working at Applied Biosystems where I write software for DNA sequencers.