I am a graduate student in the Electrical Engineering department at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, advised by Babak Hassibi in the EE department and Adam Wierman in the CS department. I grew up in Dallas, Texas, and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in December 2006, with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.A. in Plan II Honors (a liberal arts honors program). In January 2006, I moved to Los Angeles to work for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and I began a Masters/Ph.D. program at Caltech in the fall of that year, intially funded by a 3-year NDSEG fellowship and later by an Atwood fellowship from Caltech. I obtained my M.S. in June 2009, passed my Ph.D. candidacy exam in May 2010, and expect to graduate in June 2012.
Research Interests
My research interests include complex networks, communications, and distributed algorithms. I am particularly interested in the structure of social networks, such as heavy-tailed degree distributions, small diameter, and high clustering. My research seeks to exploit these unique structural properties to gain new understanding of, and perhaps solve, previously intractable problems, such as matching markets with peer effects and the spread of information on complex dynamic networks.
