About me

The Audio Engineering Detour

I started college thinking I'd become an audio engineer. I was in a band throughout most of school, gigging around the Boston area and Western Mass, collecting audio gear, and recording friends. I even convinced my undergraduate advisor to let me start a student-run recording studio in the basement of the engineering department.

But somewhere along the way, I realized that recording musicians professionally wasn't really for me. I discovered Arduino projects and got obsessed with this idea of physical computing—building circuits that could sense the environment and using code to process that information. It was like combining the physical and digital worlds in ways that felt creative and expressive.

The Community Arts Awakening

After graduating with my electrical engineering degree, I made what many would consider an unusual choice: instead of taking a high-paying corporate job, I became an AmeriCorps VISTA working for AS220, a community arts organization in Providence, Rhode Island. I became their Fab Lab coordinator and discovered this whole world I didn't know existed—the MIT Fab Lab network, digital fabrication, and a global community of people actually making real things you could touch and feel.

At AS220, I learned that running community programming is really, really hard, but also incredibly rewarding. I wore many hats: recruiting teachers, developing course catalogs, teaching workshops, taking on commission work. I fell in love with this holistic approach to making that combined computer design, prototyping, electronics, and coding all in one.

The Academic Detour

After AS220, my now-wife and I decided to do something completely spontaneous. We moved into our 2002 Volvo station wagon and lived out of the car for several months, traveling around the US with no real plan. During a stop in Charlottesville, Virginia, to visit family, I happened to read about a UVA professor who had just landed a major NSF grant to integrate digital fabrication into local schools.

For five years, I worked on developing educational kits that recreated historic American inventions like the telegraph, electric motor, and battery. These weren't just history lessons—they were transparent, hands-on projects where students could see how things worked while learning principles of electricity, magnetism, and engineering design.

Graduate school taught me how to think critically, write effectively, and understand how knowledge is constructed. But more importantly, it reinforced my belief that the best learning happens when people can build, break, and rebuild things with their own hands.

Finding My Place

In my final year at UVA, I was invited to Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine to run their high school internship program. They offered me a job as their first-ever Fab Lab Coordinator, and I've been there ever since, now as Technology Director.

At Haystack, I've gotten to experiment with cutting-edge digital fabrication tools while working with incredibly talented artists. I developed "Haystack Labs," our Fab Lab residency program that brings together traditional craft makers and digital technologists. But equally important, I've been helping the organization transition from being primarily paper-driven to modern, cloud-first operations.

This work has helped me realize what I really love: making technology accessible and solving real problems for people who aren't necessarily "tech people."