About Me

#Personal While I'm originally from England, I currently live in Raleigh, North Carolina with my wife and two dogs. We enjoy being active together, whether that means going to the gym or taking the dogs for hikes. We're particularly lovers of the mountains and enjoy making the drive when possible. We also love traveling and are currently working on visiting all of the National Parks. As of 2024, we have visited 21 amazing parks, and we are always planning our next trip or two. In recent years, I've also fallen in love with photography. You can see some of my favorite photos at My Photography Site. I primarily shoot landscapes; in fact, my favorite part of visiting National Parks is making long hikes to get unique and hard-to-find shots. I'm also an avid hockey fan. I've been a season ticket holder for the Carolina Hurricanes for over 20 years, and I have played hockey competitively even longer. One of the great things about hockey is that it is an easy sport to continue playing into adulthood; I still play on a multiple times a week in local leagues. Of course, like most in this field, I'm a big tech enthusiast. My current fixation is working on my home lab on which I manage over 45 Docker containers (sometimes this is a second job...). My favorite project is working on home automation via Home Assistant. I'm always coming up with new automations and buying new smart devices. I've even contributed to Home Assistant and worked on custom integrations. I frequently tinker with all the standard hobbyist devices, such as Arduino, ESP8266, Raspberry Pi, etc. I try to put all of my projects on my GitHub page (see the Contact page), so check that out for some of my work. I also describe many of them in-depth in the Projects page.

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# Professional I've had the opportunity to have some great professional experiences, both while I was still in school and after I graduated. You can read more in depth about these on my Experience page. My most recent experience has been working at **Rithum (formerly ChannelAdvisor)**. I started as an intern at ChannelAdvisor in January 2017, converted to full-time after graduating with my Master's in July 2018, and I have worked in this role since. I work on the Amazon team, primarily focused on working on solutions for our Amazon sellers, who make up the largest percent of our customer base. I am a full-stack developer but I tend to primarily do backend web development in C#, but often work in the front-end with React, TypeScript, and ASP.NET. Before working at ChannelAdvisor, I worked as an intern at **Cisco** in their Security and Trust Organization, specifically on the Hardware and Firmware Security Team. The primary IP I worked on was the Cisco Secure Boot offering. In 2015, I developed a process to enable obfuscation/encryption of compiled code in FPGA block RAM. In 2016, I developed a process to enable the use of X.509 certificates to establish trust in public key storage. Finally, in 2017, I worked to design and develop a proof-of-concept for the next-generation evolution of Cisco Secure Boot rooted on firmware instead of hardware. Prior to Cisco, I interned at a small, local company called **Mi-Corporation**. Here, I worked as a software development intern, developing applications in multiple .NET languages and doing some web development and scripting in JavaScript. I was also relocated to London, England for a month to work as a consultant with Transport for London. What experiences lie ahead?

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# Academics Throughout my academic career, I had a variety of unique experiences in the computing industry. I first completed my undergraduate education in May 2016 when I graduated from NC State with a **double B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering**. I graduated summa cum laude and valedictorian with a GPA of 4.0. After graduation, I immediately went back to NC State and pursued an **M.S. in Computer Science**, which I received in May 2018 with a 4.0 GPA, focusing on a **track in Security**. In the process of completing my undergraduate, I was the recipient of two distinguished scholarships. For my junior year, I received the Dewey Carr Ogburn Memorial Scholarship, awarded by the NC State ECE department to a single student each year. In my senior year, I received the Willian E. and Carol L. Highfill Scholarship in Engineering from the College of Engineering. I've also had an interesting career in academic research. In my senior year of my undergrad and first years of my Masters, I participated in a research project under Dr. Michael Devetsikiotis. This specific project was a **solution for indoor localization using Bluetooth Low Energy devices**. This project was published at the IEEE Infocom Workshop on Smart Cities in April 2017. The paper can be found here, and more info can be found in my projects page. In my final year of my Masters, I was the primary research on a project called **How Bad Can It Git? Characterizing Secret Leakage in Public GitHub Repositories**. I authored the paper, which was accepted and published at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) in Feburary 2019. NDSS is one of the top tier academic security conferences in the world, so it was an honor for me to be able to attend and present. The paper can be found here, and more info can be found in my projects page.