My formal education began when I was about 5 year old. My father, a professor of french literature at Indiana University - Purdue University at Fort Wayne (that's Indiana, the northeastern part), was experimenting with ways of teaching the french language to children. Along with my older sister and one of my younger brothers (and an assortment of other specially selected children - they too were children of the faculty running the program), a college career was begun.

As an undergraduate and graduate student I tried to soak up part of that firehose of knowledge and wisdom from MIT. Soak is probably not the appropriate operative word. I ended up getting a lot of Charles River water as well.

PhD in Mechanical Engineering, 1996. (MIT)

Thesis: a genetic algorithm for resource-constrained scheduling

Minor: deutsch

In May of 1992 I passed the PhD qualifying examinations and officially started my quest for a doctoral degree. My doctoral committee included Woodie Flowers, Mark Jakiela, Karl Ulrich, and Steve Graves.

Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering, 1991. (MIT)

Dynamics and control.

Master of Science in Management, 1991. (MIT Sloan School of Management)

Operations management and marketing.

The research for my masters' degree was done at Kodak. I spent 7 months at the Kodak Apparatus Division comparing various rapid prototyping technologies and developing methods for improving the estimatation of product quality and process capabilities for stereolithography, rubber molding, CNC machining, and 3D CAD solid modelling. At this time I was a Fellow in the Leaders for Manufacturing program. My thesis advisors were Karl Ulrich and Woodie Flowers.

Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, 1989. (MIT)

For my bachelor's thesis I wrote the first version of lgraph, an XWindows-based program (some of my first code was in X10, by the way :) that derived state equations from a graphically-input linear graph of dynamic systems. My thesis advisor was Will Durfee. The lgraph program eventually became a part of the Interactive Dynamics and Controls software package.