About

I grew up in Stratford, Ontario, where my parents have worked at the Stratford Festival my entire life. Video games were my thing from the beginning — a neighbour's PlayStation, a hand-me-down Sega Genesis, then a computer programming summer camp at twelve that made me want to understand how the games I played were made. I started writing games in Turing and posting them on CompSci.ca.

My parents convinced me to do an Arts degree. I studied Classical history, ancient languages, and archaeology at Queen's University. In 2014 I went on archaeological excavation in Italy. While I was there, Google published their DeepDream results. I remember looking at those images and wanting badly to understand how they were made. I finished my degree and enrolled in Computing the following year.

The second degree was the best time of my life. In my fourth year I developed a novel cognitive model of binary decision timing with Dr. François Rivest, which became my undergraduate thesis. A course on Human-Computer Interaction introduced me to the idea that human cognition could be modelled computationally and used to guide the design of interactive systems. That idea sent me to graduate school.

I joined the EQUIS lab under Dr. Nick Graham and spent six years building AI systems and studying how people used them. The research required recruiting participants from the spinal cord injury community, which I did through a sustained relationship with Spinal Cord Injury Ontario that began when I started volunteering with them in my first year of the PhD. That community access wasn't incidental to the work — it was the work. Studies of accessible game design that don't involve disabled players are not studies of accessible game design.

Alongside the SCI Ontario relationship, I trained formally in accessibility and inclusive design through the NSERC CREATE READi program — a cross-university initiative between Carleton, Ottawa, and Queen's. I completed Level 3 certification, which included coursework, an annual symposium, and an action team project conducted in partnership with Kingston Circus Arts. Our project developed inclusive coaching materials for movement classes with participants of mixed abilities, using participatory design with the disability community and with Erin Ball, a circus performer, coach, and disability advocate. I was twice the sole teaching assistant for the graduate Deep Learning course at Queen's during the PhD. My dissertation was filed in 2023.

After the PhD I worked as a software developer at Trihedral Engineering Limited in Halifax, where I built UI/UX improvements and industrial automation protocol drivers for VTScada software. I now live in Halifax with my wife, Kayleigh, and our dog, Hector. I am looking for a research role studying the human side of AI — what users believe about AI systems, how those beliefs fail, and what that means for how AI is designed and evaluated.