Behind the Lens · A Son's Chapter
Through the finish arch · Wilson Endurance Sports
Business Analyst · Cisco Systems
Jamestown, New York
M.S., Biomedical Engineering
University at Buffalo
B.S., Biology
Allegheny College
Financial Planning & Analysis, Deep Learning, and adjacent disciplines
Subject matter expertise · Functional analysis · Process improvement
The Professional Arc
April 2024 – Present
Cisco Systems · Full-time, Remote
New York, New York
Financial Planning & Analysis and deep learning converge in the current chapter — translating the patterns inside enterprise data into decisions that a global technology company can act upon. The work draws on a long-held aptitude for turning complexity into legibility.
Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) · Deep Learning · and +55 adjacent skills
December 2021 – April 2024
Techworkers · Full-time
San Jose, California
Two and a half years in the gravitational field of Silicon Valley — cutting one's teeth on process improvement and financial analysis in a company that exists for the express purpose of moving technical talent where it is needed most.
Process Improvement · Financial Planning & Analysis · and +58 adjacent skills
August 2018 – May 2020
University at Buffalo
Graduate study at UB with a 3.8 GPA, concentrating in machine learning, deep learning, MRI, and statistical analytics — the modern toolkit for turning medical imaging and biomedical data into something a machine can read. Culminated in test-script work at the intersection of software rigor and biomedical application.
2008 – 2012
Allegheny College
Four years in Meadville, Pennsylvania — the small liberal arts college where the life of the mind is still taken seriously. A 3.5 GPA, membership in Phi Delta Theta, and varsity participation in swimming and tennis. He also carried a minor in music, playing violin and piano — a quieter line on the transcript that said something about the breadth of him. The athlete's habit of showing up on time, every day, in all weather — a discipline that has since migrated into every other domain of his life.
The Long Miles
Somewhere between the analyst's laptop and the family life he has assembled in Jamestown, he carves out the hours — the early morning swims, the long rides on the country roads north of town, the running miles that accumulate week after week through weather most people would regard as a reason to stay inside. The collegiate swimmer at Allegheny is still in there, but the project now is longer, lonelier, and in many respects harder: the triathlon, and beyond that, the full distance of an Ironman.
The arc, looking back, is a clean one. From the Southwestern swim team as a boy, to the Allegheny pool as a young man, to the local triathlons and the full Ironman distances in Arizona and Montreal — he has proven, over and over, across decades and disciplines, that he can do hard things, and do them well. Every so often I go back through the old photographs and I see him — the child at the edge of the lane, the college athlete, the man at the finish line — and it is unmistakably the same person, the same steady temperament, only the scale of the undertaking has grown.
He was, by the time he started training seriously for triathlon, already an accomplished swimmer — the water was never going to be the question. What stood out to me, and still does, was the run. Running was the discipline that did not come freely. It had to be constructed, mile by patient mile, through the slow accrual of workouts that no one saw. He made himself into a better runner the same way he had made himself into a better student, a better engineer, a better athlete across every distance he took on — by attending to it, week after week, without fanfare. That, more than any finishing time, is the part I find myself most proud of.
It takes a particular cast of mind to train for something like this. The distances are not trivial — the Ironman's 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, and 26.2-mile run are, in aggregate, a small act of civil engineering performed by the body over the course of a single day. Most of the work happens months in advance, in the unglamorous stretches of the calendar when no one is watching: the threshold intervals on a February trainer, the brick workouts in July humidity, the Sunday long rides where the real question is not whether the legs will hold but whether the mind will.
Ironman Montreal · on the run
A Father's Reflection
He is our first son. He has been in our lives for half of ours now — a fact I find almost impossible to absorb when I stop long enough to hold it still. One moment he was the small boy at the edge of the pool, and the next he was a man with his own life, his own rhythms, his own long arcs quietly under construction.
"He is a standout — and in a lot of ways, looking back at the old photographs, he is me."
He is a standout. I do not say that as a father performing the expected flourish; I say it because the evidence has accumulated, year after year, in the form of things done well and done quietly. And when I go back through the old photographs — the boyhood ones, the Allegheny ones, the ones from the races — I am struck, sometimes gently and sometimes not, by how much of him is me. The set of the jaw. The focus. The particular way of leaning into a hard thing until it yields.
He is a beautiful, sensitive, strong, intelligent man. He will make his mark — on his own timetable, in his own voice, and in a shape none of us can fully predict from here. That is the pleasure of it. That is the whole privilege of watching a son become himself.