This is a "Now page"—it details what I'm focused on right now, at this point in my life.

I'm currently a machine learning engineer at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University, think of it as similar to MIT Lincoln Labs. My work focuses on autonomous systems, with a recent emphasis on unmanned surface vessels (USVs). I've been wrapping up a study examining the current capabilities of autonomous USV systems to help inform senior leadership about the state of the practice.

In late November, I was awarded $1.8 million in congressionally allocated research funding for a two-year project focused on course of action planners for autonomous systems. I'm partnering with CMU's AirLab to apply some of this work to disaster response scenarios, and I've been exploring how agentic AI systems might be tailored to this use case.

I'm a lifelong learner. Last year I transferred from SEI's Arlington, VA office to Pittsburgh to have better access to campus resources. This fall, I took a course through the Robotics Institute on Human-Robot Interaction which I wrote about here. I'm currently working through the SolveIt course from Answer.ai, and I'm on the waitlist for a course called AI Agents for Engineers starting in January.