Background

I grew up on the east coast, in central Virginia—so I had the chance to experience "weather" before moving to southern California for college at Harvey Mudd (chemistry) and my master's work at The Scripps Research Institute (crystallography). After a decade in IT, I transitioned into image analysis and, with the help of Brian Armstrong at City of Hope, microscopy. At City of Hope's Light Microscopy Core, I trained researchers, supported experiments from scratch assays to multi-day live imaging, and developed analysis pipelines—work I've continued collaborating on through 2025.

I'm now in my final year of a PhD in Biomedical Engineering at UW-Madison, where I'm building open-source control software for light sheet and polarization microscopy systems. My goal is to tie together my background in coding, chemistry, and biological imaging to build tools that help scientists navigate complex imaging infrastructure more effectively.

And yes, I've had to relearn how to deal with weather. Current temperature as I type, a balmy -15C.

Open science is the key to the future

I operate at the intersection of image analysis, coding, biology, and microscopy. My introduction to image analysis came through QuPath and the amazing support provided by its author, Pete Bankhead. My continued experiences with both open and proprietary software, and the companies and groups that produce them, have led me to the conclusion that the way forward is truly open solutions where everyone is free to understand how the code works. Creating open solutions that are not only transparent but also easy to use is a lot of work, however. Implementing these solutions will require international collaborations and financial support. Several companies including RareCyte and ACDbio are looking into the use of QuPath to support their other products.

Openness and transparency go beyond "free" software, allowing different open programs to integrate into pipelines where each step of the process can be dissected and understood. Such pipelines will also increase the re-usability of scientific articles and the repeatability of results - speeding overall scientific progress and eliminating dead ends due to poorly chosen scientific experimental designs.  I serve on the steering committee for QUAREP-LiMi, a worldwide initiative to improve quality and reproducibility in light microscopy. I'm also an administrator on the Image.sc forum, a founding member of BINA's Early Career working group, and taught image analysis at MBL's Analytical and Quantitative Light Microscopy course in 2023.

Member of:

 Other (non-QuPath) open source projects and collaborations I support/follow.