About

Strategic out of the box thinker, hardworking achiever, maximizer looking for continuous process improvement.

During summer breaks from college, I worked jobs in construction in various forms. The suggestion and opportunities came from my father. My father was a successful Insurance agent, many of whose clients and friends owned local construction companies. The work was hard and often dangerous that left me exhausted at the end of the day. The spark of pride and sense of accomplishment started to grow inside of as I could point to a physical structure and say, “I helped build.” When I came time to pick a major in college, Engineering was suggested and seemed like a good fit. Ultimately, I found my way to Civil Engineering which should have been an obvious choice, but was discovered until I took statics. I took great pleasure in the “concrete” nature of the problem sets and the fact that you could check your work to confirm the correct answer. This cemented the deal.

I graduated from Vanderbilt University with a Bachelor of Engineering.  The summer after my fourth year, I blended education with travel. As part of the People to People Student Ambassador Program, I traveled to the former Soviet Union with group Civil Engineering students like myself from all of the United States.  In Moscow, St. Petersburg and Prague we visited local universities and even Star City (Russian: Звёздный городо́к, Zvyozdny gorodok) where Cosmonauts of the Russian Federal Space Agency, and the Soviet space program before it, have lived and trained in Star City since the 1960s. I finished my degree writing papers on the construction practices I documented during the trip.

I attended the University of Texas at Austin and obtained my Master of Science in Engineering. My course work focused on Construction Engineering and Project Management where I authored my thesis “A survey of Construction Workers’ Training, Work Practices, and Perception of Safety”.