Greetings to all who have stumbled upon my little place on the world wide webs. Here I will share some of my interests and passions with anyone who is interested. (Okay, maybe not too much passion.)
First, a little about myself. I was born and raised in Buffalo, New York (Go Bills!) and attended Canisius College for my undergraduate studies. I graduated in 2002 with a B.S. degree in chemistry and mathematics. I then continued on to Pittsburgh and studied statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. I obtained my M.S. in statistics in 2003 and completed my PhD under the direction of Robert Kass in 2009. In the meantime, I had been hired as a visiting assistant professor at Lafayette starting in 2007. I continued in this position for four years until being rehired as assistant professor in 2011 and then promoted to associate professor in 2018. As of now, I am proud to call myself one of Lafayette’s three statisticians and I look forward to improving the statistical offerings of our department.
My interests are many and diverse, reflected in both my activities and my areas of research. One of the beauties of statistics (and mathematics) in general is that it can be found just about everywhere. And as a result, I find myself attracted to projects of all kinds. My thesis work was on modeling neural behavior using Markov models, with an extension into curve fitting using Bayesian Adaptive Regression Splines. Recently, I have more active in economic applications of statistics, modeling inflation measures using breakpoint analysis, assessing forecasts of inflation behavior, evaluating models for stock trading, and examining option pricing. However, as I stated, my interests are many and diverse and I have been working on separate projects including studies of student behavior as related to drug and alcohol usage, response of students to presentations of scientific material, and even sabremetrics for baseball and hockey.
When not in my office, you can usually find me with students playing cards in the common room or simply discussing life in general. Feel free to stop by and talk about anything. If you can’t find me, I’m probably home contemplating the deep meanings of life while tending my garden. Or out playing disc golf. One or the other.
Classes Taught
Current Courses
Past Regular Courses
- Math 161 – Calculus I (last taught Fall 2016) Syllabus
- Math 286 – Introduction to Probability and Mathematical Statistics (last taught Spring 2017) Syllabus
- Math 287 – Introduction to Data Modeling (last taught Fall 2021) Syllabus
- Math 335 – Probability (last taught Fall 2020) Syllabus
- Math 336 – Mathematical Statistics (last taught Spring 2019) Syllabus
Past Special Topics Courses