About Me
I was born in Provo, Utah where I spent my early childhood. When I was six years old my father's construction business brought my family to southern New York, where we stayed for eight years. In the early 1990s the housing industry slowed in New York and boomed in Utah, so we moved back and remained there during my high school years. It's interesting to note that, if you average the places where I grew up (New York and Utah), my home town is Iowa City!
After high school, I entered Brigham Young University with a woodshop scholarship. At the age of 19, I took a two-year break from my studies to serve as an ecclesiastical representative for my church in the southern Mexican states of Puebla and Tlaxcala. I changed my major after returning to BYU, graduating in 2005 with a double B.A. in spanish translation, economics, and a minor in mathematics. I am currently in my fifth year of Ph.D. studies in economics at the University of Iowa.
My hobbies are woodworking, following college football, cycling, roller/ice hockey, hanging out with my three kids and cooking with my wife. During our time in Iowa, we have engaged in extensive R&D in apple-pie and cinnamon-roll technology.
The top picture to the right was taken on the day I had a run-in with the Galactic Empire. I'm smiling in the picture because little did my captor know that my friend Justin Goodson was standing by with superior knowledge of the force (bottom right). Justin is pursuing a Ph.D. degree in management science at the University of Iowa. These pictures were taken in 2007 at the anual Trekfest in Riverside, Iowa, the official future home of James T. Kirk, captain of the starship USS Enterprise. In case you are wondering what a storm trooper is doing at a Star Trek festival, the town of Riverside allows the Star Wars crowd to participate also, as long as they wear proper Star Trek insignia.
The picture at the bottom of the page is an interactive map of Mexico showing the location of the city of Puebla, Puebla (lower middle) 60 miles southeast of Mexico City on the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. The map shows the four major volcanoes near the city of Puebla: the Popocatepetl and the Iztaccihuatl, side by side to the west; the Malinche to the northeast; and the Pico de Orizaba, a little further away and due east (just to the east of Ciudad Serdan). The Popocatepetl, or "Popo", is the second largest of the four and has been active since 1994. It was an eye-opening experience to live in mountain villages at the foot of the Popo, where volcano evacuation routes are painted on the sides of buildings! Tlaxcala is a small state on the northwest border of the state of Puebla. The state capital, Tlaxcala, Tlaxcala, appears just north of Puebla on the map.
