About Me

Originally from Casper, Wyoming, I graduated from Brigham Young University with a B.S. in economics in 2023 where I served as the head computer vision developer at the Record Linking Lab . I led a team of 5-9 developers in building CV tools for genealogy. These generally consisted of automatic census transcription and handwriting recognition.

Working with collaborators and clients such as FamilySearch, World Archives, the Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation, and researchers from many notable universities, we leveraged custom BYU handwriting recognition models and segmentation classifiers to build a pipeline that inputs grid images (e.g. census records) and outputs a CSV transcription. I have presented at several conferences, including the BYU Family History Technology Workshop and the exclusive President's Leadership Council, which is an annual event for the top 1% of BYU donors.

Current projects include a collaboration with Harvard Business School PhD candidate, Jonathan Palmer, in which I leverage BYU and open-source OCR tools to build an ML pipline to get a sense of changes in professional networks, the propensity for entrepreneurship, and the overall impact of the Kodak crash on the economy in Rochester, New York. You can learn more about the project here.

At Carnegie Mellon, I work with Matthew Denes (CMU), Spyridon Lagaras (University of Pittsburgh), and Margarita Tsoutsoura (Washington University at St. Louis) on several projects that utilize big administrative tax data. These include a study on the impact of the timing of government support on firms, and another on the impact of the gig economy on entrepreneurship.

I developed my technical skills from osmosis through programmers on my team, YouTube tutorials, online communities such as Stack Overflow, and a library of books I have accumulated on Python, machine learning, and data science. I am active in the international ML community. My time at CMU grants me the opportunity to enhance my self-study with the world's best courses in ML and computer science from some of the biggest names in the field.

At BYU, I was a vocal percussionist (beatboxer) in the BYU premier co-ed a cappella group, 1AChord, a member of the Honors Program, and am still a Pickleball fiend. From 2017 to 2019 I served as a volunteer missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the East Lost Angeles area, where I developed a love for Spanish and Latin American literature and an empathy for the plight of many migrants and refugees in the United States, which I expect this to be the topic of many of my future projects. I am ACTFL certified fluent in Spanish and volunteer 3-5 hours each week teaching English to Spanish speakers.

Also check out:

Moving To His Own Beat - BYU Honors Program

Telling the Family, Home, and Social Sciences Story - LDS Philanthropies

President's Leadership Council Presentation - BYU

Presenters at the Family History Technology Workshop - BYU

BYU 1Achord a capella