Who I Am
An avid lover of all things out-of-doors, writer, speaker, filmmaker, innovator, and world traveler. I find connections and build bridges. I bring people into common spaces and shared times, then motivate potentials into reality.

I enjoy storytelling, both sharing and receiving. It is, for me, the most genuine way to connect with another human. This is something we have shared for some fifty thousand years, long before telecommunications, when the campfire was the meeting place and conversations unfolded across the embers. As modern inhabitants of a far faster paced world we yet share that heritage, even if we have forgotten it in ourselves.

This is why we attend the theater, why we go to the movies. This is why we gather at restaurants, bars, and meeting halls; this is why coffee shops and Internet cafés have grown in popularity, to counter our feeling alone in a world that works to disconnect us despite the promise of digital communication.

When not at my worksite at Biosphere 2, or attending conferences or giving lectures, I live in the San Pedro River valley of Southeastern Arizona with my partner Colleen. We embrace the wildlife that surrounds us each and every day, a kind of kinship and magic that most of the world has forsaken in the expanding jungles of asphalt and concrete. We explore wilderness areas on foot and by boat, running and paddling our way across ancient lands. We never feel alone in these places, for everywhere we look there are living, breathing creatures looking back at us.

Moving Along the Non-Linear Function
From 1999 through 2008 my professional and personal identities were wrapped into one. As co-founder and CEO of a leading Linux operating system (Yellow Dog Linux) and high performance computing solutions provider, my work helped to shape the use of Linux and supercomputers around the world. In that capacity I was a salesman, problem solver, and manager of a small, agile team that accomplished the impossible. Yet each time I drove away from a client site part of me was left behind. I promised myself that I would return to the sciences not as a salesman but as a researcher who contributes to the shared understanding of the universe, and our place in it.

With Terra Soft and YDL behind me, in 2012 I sold most everything I own and put the rest of my life in storage. With a Canon 60D, two lenses, laptop and backpack I traveled the world shooting films about wildlife conservation, military occupation, archaeology, astronomy and science discovery. Some of my films were funded by the National Science Foundation, some won awards, and some accomplished simpler, more personal goals.

In 2014 I moved to South Africa to earn a Masters degree in Applied Mathematics. I learned to focus again, finding deep pleasure in research, programming, surfing and friends. The night my biologically inspired machine learning code evolved a solution for the first time will remain with me forever as a vivid, extraordinary moment in my life. Through my research in evolutionary computation applied to the mitigation of noise in radio astronomy I gained a deeper understanding of how to use machine learning and data mining to better understand the world around us, and ourselves. Doors opened to work in gravitational-wave astronomy and then Mars habitation.

At Arizona State University my team developed SIMOC (2017-19), a closed ecosystem computer model and educational interface supported for four years by the National Geographic Society. At the University of Arizona Biosphere 2 my team has since January 2021 built and operated SAM, a hermetically sealed, pressurized Mars habitat analog and research center, complete with controlled environment for bioregeneration, crew living quarters, airlock, CO2 scrubber research center, and an indoor, geologically accurate Mars yard.

The vector of my journey continues to shift, sometimes pointing this way, sometimes that, but it is never straight and narrow. I have learned to embrace the non-linear functions, to pursue the outliers, for in these lie the unexpected, the greatest challenges, the opportunities to do something novel and new.