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My story begins on a cool autumn day in November of 1984, when I was the first of three sons born to my parents in the city of Cortland, New York. I lived in Cortland for the first 4 years of my life before moving to the nearby town of Marathon, New York, population 2,000. Marathon is known for the Central New York Maple Festival, which is held in the town annually. I grew up with a carefree childhood, surrounded by farmland, family, and plenty of space to let my imagination run wild.
After graduating from Marathon High School in 2003, I moved back to Cortland and began attending the State University of New York (SUNY) College at Cortland, where I pursued my Bachelor of Science in psychology. While at Cortland, I was fortunate to have many amazing professors, including three in particular whom served essential advisor roles in my development as an academic: Dr. Raymond Collings, Dr. Leslie Eaton, and Dr. David Berger. I worked as a research assistant under all three, and gained experience in everything from programming computer-based attention studies to conducting psychophysiology research to analyzing alcohol consumption in rats. I also had the opportunity to travel to Washington D.C. to present research I had conducted with Dr. Collings, a review paper on the cognitive effects of long-term space flight, which included an opportunity to introduce my research to Hillary Clinton, then Senator for New York.
I graduated from SUNY Cortland with highest honors (summa cum laude) in 2007. I took a year off from school (the only year off between ages 5-30), during which I was hired as a tutor for at-risk youth by the Cortland Youth Bureau. They stationed me back in my alma mater of Marathon High School, where I had the pleasure of working side by side with many of my former teachers. This experience taught me a lot about how to interact with students who are struggling, and I carry these lessons with me today as a teaching professor.
In 2008, I moved 3.5 hours away from home to State College, Pennsylvania, and began pursuing my Master’s and Ph.D. in social psychology at Penn State as a graduate student advisee of Dr. Reg Adams in his Social Vision and Interpersonal Perception Lab. Under Dr. Adams, I had the opportunity to be a part of numerous exciting research projects, predominately within the domain of face perception. In both my Master’s Thesis and Doctoral Dissertation, we explored the role that gender stereotypes play in moderating attention to facial expressions. In less than 1/3rd of a second, we are attending to facial expressions of men and women differently. Given the role that attention plays in filtering information to be processed, this may have profound impacts on how stereotypes are formed and maintained.
A few major life milestones happened during my time as a graduate student at Penn State. I taught my first course in the summer of 2013 (PSYCH 100). I fell in love with teaching, and toward the end of my dissertation, my career interests shifted from a more research-focused career to a teaching-focused career. While research has been very fun and engaging, I find that teaching is particularly rewarding. Being able to work with students to hone their critical thinking skills, as well as helping guide them to open their minds to new thoughts and ideas is what really drives me. The relationship is reciprocal as well as I’ve never taught a course where I didn’t learn just as much from the students. Students, with their diverse backgrounds and stories, are what psychology is all about. What makes us tick? What brings about our similarities as well as our differences? There isn’t an aspect of our lives where psychology doesn’t have something important to say.
In addition to discovering my love for teaching, I also met the love of my life, Karri, while I was a graduate student. We met on an online dating site in 2011 (yes, an online dating success story!). She lived in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, home to the Little League World Series, and about an hour drive north of State College. Karri was working on her Master’s degree in Social Work at the time. After a year of weekend drives back and forth, she moved in with me in State College. Soon after that, we failed as dog foster parents and adopted our 7th foster dog, a miniature pinscher/chihuahua named Samson. I proposed to Karri on December 21, 2012, the day the world was supposed to end. The world thankfully didn’t end, so we got married in 2014 in front of friends and family in State College!
I finished my Ph.D. in the summer of 2015, at which time Karri and I moved to Denver, Colorado. At the time that we decided to move, I did not have a job lined up. I had planned on piecing together a few adjunct instructor positions, and knew that in order to do this, I would have to live in a big city where there were multiple colleges/universities. Denver seemed like a perfect fit for us, as we both love hiking and the outdoors. Denver, as one of the fastest growing big cities in the nation, had a large number of social work jobs available for Karri, which was another big draw. Before we moved, I was called into Dr. Rich Carlson’s office, Associated Head of the Psychology Department at Penn State. He offered me an opportunity to join the faculty, and given my impending move to Denver, allowed me to have World Campus courses only so I could teach remotely.
Originally, my teaching position was thought of as temporary. I would use this as an opportunity to work while I looked for a more traditional academic position. However, during the first year of teaching, I continued to be reminded of why I loved teaching. And teaching for World Campus in particular. I see online education as the future of higher education (a belief that has only strengthened since the pandemic), and I saw an opportunity to be on the cutting edge of this movement, working for the number 1 online university on the planet. So I made my intentions known that I wanted to continue to do this full-time, and here I am!
I began the Online Students of Psychology Lab in 2016 in an effort to provide research experience opportunities to World Campus students. In the lab, students work on various research studies related to their research interests. Additionally, in 2017, I became a faculty advisor for Active Minds at Penn State World Campus, the first online chapter of Active Minds, a national student organization dedicated to reducing the stigma associated with mental illness. I held this position until Spring 2022, when I stepped aside to make more time for a new addition to my family (see below).
In the summer of 2019, Karri and I began living a nomadic lifestyle, traveling full time. We were tired of big city living, and we were tired of the ever-increasing rent. We started out with a 1992 Chevy G20 van that we converted into a campervan. The van had some quirks….the gas gauge didn’t work correctly, it would randomly shut off at times when putting it into reverse, and it came with tires from the 1990s. But it was cheap, and it ran great (when going forward), and it had fairly low miles for its age. We weren’t sure if we would stick with the lifestyle, so we wanted something affordable, and this was it. We gutted the interior and installed a bed, counter space, a solar panel for electricity, and a DIY toilet. We got a lot of help from Karri’s grandpa, who is a woodworker and had a shop full of tools. We spent every day for nearly 2 months in his garage working on the van. We lived in the van for 8 months and traveled through South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and California. During a cold and windy streak in the desert outside of Yuma, AZ, when we were stuck inside for several days, we decided that we needed more space. A few weeks later, we were in Mesa, AZ picking up a class C RV. We continued traveling for another 2 years in the RV, doing another loop around the country. Our style of camping was boondocking, which means camping with no electrical, water, or sewer hook ups. Generally speaking, we just pulled off the road and that was home for 2 weeks. Much of the western US is owned by the federal government (National Forest or Bureau of Land Management land), which allows camping for 2 weeks at a time. Living this way, we had to learn how to conserve resources. In the RV, we could only hold 35 gallons of water, which is the amount of water an average person uses in a single shower. We had to make that last 2 weeks before we moved to our next location. Needless to say, we weren’t showering daily (we would travel into towns 2-3 times a week to get showers at Planet Fitness or truck stops). Our electrical needs were met as long as the sun was shining, but on cloudy days, we had to conserve electricity. There were many nights where we cooked over a campfire to conserve propane. Although it was challenging at times, it was a great lesson in what little resources we actually need in order to survive. We traded comfort for freedom and adventure, and we met a lot of really interesting people along the way. And because we almost always camped for free, we were able to save enough money to pay off our student loans and put some money away toward a future downpayment on a house.
In 2022, we left the full-time nomadic lifestyle. We had good reason to, as we decided that it was time to settle down and have a baby. It just so happened that my parents were looking to sell their home, the home I grew up in, so it made a lot of sense for us to buy the house (with a family discount) and raise our child in the same carefree environment I grew up in. In August 2022, we welcomed baby Karli to our family. This new chapter of my life is by far the most fulfilling (and tiring). We kept the RV, and Karli will be introduced to the wonderful world of nomadic living, albeit part-time. The winters in central New York are long and brutal, with the highest annual snowfall amounts east of the Rocky Mountains. Winters seem like a good time to pack the family in the RV and escape! As of now, we intend to homeschool, a privilege we have as work from home parents who get to set our own work schedules.