About

About me

I'm an Army veteran, former NASA Fellow, ex-Deloitter, founder of a Nashville-based AI company (Mangrove), and Assistant Professor of Practice in the College of Connected Computing. I have spent my career building AI systems in high-risk environments and am passionate about AI education, safety, and reliability.

I teach foundational courses in the accelerated Generative AI Master's program, Data Science Master's program, and Data Science Minor program.

I earned my PhD from Vanderbilt University, studying under Gautam Biswas in the Modeling & Analysis of Complex Systems group, at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems.

I have a wife (also a Vanderbilt professor!) and a rising sophomore. When I am not building agents I am relaxing with my family or playing with my dog named Mina.

Experience

• 2024 -Assistant Professor of Practice, College of Connected Computing, Vanderbilt University
• 2025 -Co-Founder, Mangrove Technologies
• 2024 - 2026Manager, Applied AI, Deloitte
• 2022 - 2024Founder & President, Delta Labs
• 2020 - 2023NASA Fellow, NASA Ames Research Center, Intelligent Systems Division
• 2022 - 2023VP, Engineering, Arms Cyber Defense
• 2022 - 2023Guest Research Scholar, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden
• 2019 - 2022Founder & CEO, Intelligent Systems
• 2006 - 2013Airborne Infantry, then Avionics Maintenance Supervisor, U.S. Army

Education

• PhD, Computer Science. Vanderbilt University, 2023. Dissertation: A Health-Aware Replanning Framework for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Stochastic Environments. Advisor: Gautam Biswas.
• MS, Computer Science. Vanderbilt University, 2022.
• BS, Computer Science, magna cum laude. Tennessee State University, 2017. Minor in mathematics.

Honors and credentials

• NASA Fellowship, one of five major-university recipients nationally (2020 - 2023)
• NSF I-Corps, Entrepreneurial Lead (2020)
• VentureWell E-Teams Stage 1 (2020) and Stage 2 (2021), and ASPIRE (2021)
• 1st place, Sohr Grant pitch competition, Vanderbilt Owen (2019)
• Patent pending: Intelligent Fault Detection System (U.S. 17/356,495)
• PMP, CSPO, (ISC)2 CC, CompTIA Security+, FINRA SIE

Contact

The best way to reach me is LinkedIn. For Mangrove, see mangrove.ai.