I hail from Michigan, home of numerous excellent breweries including (but not limited to!) Founders, New Holland, and Bell’s. I attended Grand Valley State University for a degree in Statistics. followed by graduate school at Western Michigan University, where I ultimately earned both a MS and PhD.
Rajib Paul (now at UNC-Charlotte) directed my dissertation which was, broadly speaking, on the topic of methods for large geostatistical datasets that do not follow Normality. I have implemented some of the methods in an very-much-incomplete R package RRSM.
After finishing my PhD Shyamal Peddada (now at University of Pittsburgh) offered my as postdoctoral research position at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. We worked on some spatial methods (in particular, Threshold Knot Selection), but he also introduced me to the area of order-restricted inference. With him I wrote the R package CLME, which implements a constrained linear mixed effects model using nonparametric bootstrap for inference.
After my post-doc, I was an assistant professor at West Virginia University. While there I worked with researchers in a variety of disciplines including Forensics, Geography, and Medicine.
For various reasons, I left academia and joined a research lab where I am in a Statistics group assisting mostly engineers who are working on interesting and important projects.
Rajib introduced me to both spatial and bayesian statistics. As my PhD advisor, he was intrumental on guiding me along the path to research in statistical methods.
Shyamal took a chance and offered me my first professonal job as a post-doctoral fellow. He picked up where Rajib left off, teaching me more about the world of research, and helped to push me further along on the path of independent scholarship.
Bradford and I attended GVSU and WMU together. We often brainstormed about how to make introductory statistics more modern, accessible, and exciting - particularly for non-majors.