Professional Bio
Product Manager at Google
Mountain View, CA
In August 2011, I moved to California to start working at Google as a Product Managet on the Street View team. To learn more, please visit the Street View website.
Before starting at Google, I worked at a small high tech company in Honolulu, Hawaii. I was fortunate to have worked on a wide range of very interesting products, addressing challenges such as:
- Can an artist who became fully paralyzed and unable to speak from ALS, finally paint again through an innovative human-computer interface… one controlled using only her brain?
- How can we use satellite-tracked ocean drifter buoys to help K-12 students understand the connection between their local actions and the accumulation of marine debris in the northern Pacific Ocean (often called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch)? Can we teach them all the science topics they need to learn while helping them become good stewards of the environment in the process?
- Is it possible for adventurers, whether they’re rowing across the Pacific Ocean, climbing Mount Everest, or running across the Sahara Desert, to engage their thousands of fans every day using social media and interactive maps?
- Can we build hardware and software that detects, in real-time, the relative level of mental effort a person is using so that we can improve their ability to multitask on a computer?
- Is our perception of objects in the world always the same, or does it change based on how our ability to interact with them (such as if we are tired)?
Prior to starting at Google, I also was a freelance website designer, working with dozens of clients, including small businesses, non-profit organizations, authors, artists, musicians, and more.
Personal Bio
My wife, Alanna, and I live in Silicon Valley in California, where we moved in 2011 from our home in Kailua, Hawaii. I moved to Hawaii in May 2003 from Charlottesville, Virginia where I went to school at the University of Virginia. I’m originally from Suffern, New York.
One of my favorite hobbies is outdoor photography (check out my photography website), which I really enjoy as an opportunity to take a different angle at even the most familiar subjects. I guess this kinda stems from my creative side, which manifests itself in various ways, from photography to graphic design to web design.
I’m also an avid reader as you can probably guess from my blogs. I try to read as often as I can and will do my best to post reviews of various books. As I get inspired, I’ll also go back and write about books I’ve read throughout the last several years. If you have any suggestions for me, please let me know.
My other interests include hiking, surfing, kayaking, skiing, and snowboarding.
Alanna and me in Maui.