About

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Old Dominion University. I have completed my coursework, passed both the written and oral comprehensive examinations, and advanced to candidacy.

My doctoral research is in AI for physics — applying machine learning to scientific inference problems in hadronic physics. Recent work uses diffusion models to recover physical distributions from raw scattering events and to perform active inference on inverse problems where the available prior information is incomplete.

Before starting the Ph.D., my research was in combinatorial optimization: learning-based methods for constraint satisfaction and for large-scale knapsack problems.

Teaching

Alongside research I have taught undergraduate computer science at Old Dominion for three semesters, and I am currently seeking an adjunct faculty appointment teaching one course per semester, in the Hampton Roads area or online.

The habit I keep coming back to is this: produce the problem before introducing the machinery. In CS 471 the concept students found hardest was concurrency, because a race condition is invisible — the code looks correct and usually runs correctly, until one time it does not. Abstract explanations of critical sections did not land. What worked was having students run a deliberately broken counter a thousand times and watch the output drift. Once they had seen the bug, mutexes stopped being vocabulary and started being a fix for something real.

The other thing I have learned is that the students who are struggling are usually the ones who do not say so. Office hours were where most of the actual learning happened in the courses I supported, so I reach out to quiet students early rather than waiting for them to ask.

Credentials

I hold an M.S. in Computer Technology and have earned 31 graduate semester hours under the CS prefix at Old Dominion at a 4.0 GPA — 15 hours of graded 800-level coursework (Natural Language Processing, Pattern Recognition and Analysis, Practical Machine Learning and Applications, Advanced Computer and Network Security, Research Methods) plus 16 hours of doctoral research and dissertation. Institutions evaluating faculty credentials usually need this stated precisely, so it is set out in full on the teaching page and in my CV.