I'm originally from Raleigh, North Carolina. I'm an alumnus of the North Carolina School of Science and Math (NCSSM), a public residental high school in Durham, NC, which is an affiliate of the UNC system.

I did my undergraduate work at Princeton University, obtaining a B.S.E in Electrical Engineering with concentrations in Signal Processing and Computer Systems & Architectures. I also minored in Computer Science. During my time there, I worked with Margaret Martonosi, my undergraduate thesis advisor, on creating information visualizations for the ZebraNet project. I also did an 8-month internship at Microsoft in Mountain View, CA.

Prior to graduate school, I worked at Microsoft in Redmond, WA. During summer of 2004, I interned at AT&T Research Labs (in Florham Park, NJ), working with Michael Johnston on confirmation strategies for dialogue managers in multimodal systems. During summer of 2005, I interned at Intel Research Seattle, working with Ian Smith on mobile social applications using Intel's PlaceLab and POLS.