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Thank you for visiting my personal homepage. I am currently a volunteer coordinator in Gulfport, MS working with victims of Hurricane Katrina in coastal Mississippi. I help run a small volunteer camp, under the auspices of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives, a local non-profit dedicated to preserving two at-risk communities in Gulfport, and Harrison County. The camp takes in volunteers and coordinates their housing and work while they're in Gulfport.
As volunteer numbers have dwindled somewhat, however, I've engaged in a bikeride from Boston, MA to Gulfport, MS to raise awareness of the ongoing need of coastal Mississippi. In an effort to dispel the single most harmful myth about the hurricane recovery operation in Coastal Mississippi, we've called it the Mississippi Ain't Fixed Yet Bike Tour. I have been on the road for nearly two months now. I am a recent graduate of Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, VA. While there, I was involved in a number of research projects in the Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, including the Distributed Spacecraft Attitude Control System Simulator, and the Distributed Ranging and Relative Attitude Sensor for Proximity Operations and Rendezvous. I was the Student Coordinator for the College of Engineering Student Assistance Center (website gone?), a tutoring center for students of the college covering most freshman, sophomore, and many junior and senior level courses in engineering. The center was staffed by about 30 underclass tutors in every department within the college. Open every day except Saturday, the center was basically a study lounge where students may study and do homework and ask for help as needed. Sadly, the SAC is now closed, as demand for it has slackened off considerably in recent semesters for reasons that do not bode well for the learning environment in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. I was a member-at-large of the Virginia Tech Chapter of Sigma Gamma Tau, the national aerospace engineering honor society, and I served as the service and publicity chairs for the Virginia Beta Chapter of Tau Beta Pi, the general engineering honor society. TBP is the largest and most well-known engineering honor society in the US, and encompasses all engineering disciplines. As service chair, I coordinated and led various community service projects. A fair percentage of these projects have been community construction projects with a group at my church called Hearts and Hammers. It's also worth mentioning that Tau Beta Pi has been instrumental in helping us plan our service trips from Virginia Tech to Gulfport. In May 2006, I received B.S. degrees from Virginia Tech in Aerospace Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics. At present, I split my time between professional interests and volunteerism. I am a project engineer for Applied Defense Solutions, Inc., where I work on a range of projects mostly in the area of astrodynamics. In January 2007, I will be attending the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech in pursuit of a PhD in Aerospace Engineering.
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