I graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, Class of 1987, with a B.S. in Systems Engineering.  (Beat Army!)  After five years of active service in the Navy, and another three years working as an engineer, I went back to graduate school to study Applied Physics at Cornell University.  I was extremely fortunate to have Professor Jim Houck of the Cornell Astronomy Department as my advisor.  He was the Principal Investigator of the Infrared Spectrograph on the Spitzer Space Telescope, one of NASA's Great Observatories.  Upon earning my Ph.D. in Applied Physics in 2002, I joined the University of Virginia Astronomy Department as a Research Scientist where Professor Mike Skrutskie was starting up an instrumentation lab.  I have been at UVa ever since.

I particularly enjoy the fields of optics, mechanics and cryogenics.  I also enjoy seeing instruments come together after multiple years of planning, design and collaboration --- most instrumentation projects require close collaboration between academic institutions, commercial companies, and observatories.  Our group has worked on a variety of instruments for telescopes ranging in size from our local Fan 31-inch Telescope to the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona.

In 2017 I was awarded, along with the APOGEE Team, the Maria and Eric Muhlmann Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for important astronomy research results based upon the development of groundbreaking instruments and techniques.

In addition to working on other projects, I currently serve as the Instrument Scientist for the APOGEE instruments of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Telescope Scientist for the Sloan Foundation 2.5-m Telescope.