I was born and raised in New Orleans, LA. I attended the University of New Orleans, where I earned a Bachelor of Science in Physics. Upon graduation, I began working for Honeywell in Clearwater, FL, as a Radiation Effects Engineer.   This job involved lots of math and testing to ensure that electronic devices could survive in a natural and man-made radiation environment. I also worked at SAIC in somewhat the same capacity, but this time the work was purely theoretical. Part of the work in these jobs involved writing software (in FORTRAN on a mainframe) to simulate radiation doses. It was at this time I began to realize how much fun writing software could be. I then made a decision to leave the theoretical world of math and physics and get my hands dirty with writing software.  And to make this happen, I left the workforce and enrolled as a full time student at the University of South Florida, where I earned my Masters Degree in Computer Science.

I’ve been working as a software engineer for quite a while now. I’ve written Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), multithreaded embedded code, 3-tier applications, math intensive engineering apps, distributed apps and business apps. I even managed a project.  All in all, it’s been fun.

Throughout it all, I always had an urge to teach and share the knowledge I’ve come across. I first began teaching as an adjunct at SPC in 1997 and I’ve enjoyed it ever since.  There’s a sense of satisfaction of planning, designing, and implementing a software product and watching it work, and I hope my enthusiasm for software engineering encourages students as they learn about computer science.