Biography, interests, hobbies

I am tapping into my inner nerd in order to examine how technology can be applied to newsgathering and news-making. For eight years I studied and worked in electronics engineering and computer science at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, at Vancouver General Hospital, in Ottawa at Nortel, in Silicon Valley, and at the University of Sussex in the U.K. But a drive for something else — for communication, for engagement, for sleuthing, or for discovery — made me switch careers.

I began freelancing in 2004, out of Vancouver, B.C. In the space of two years, I won one first-place and two third-place B.C. and Yukon Community Newspapers Association awards for freelanced feature stories that examined the relationships between urban culture, politics and the environment.

I graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in May 2009. My thesis was on birth control hormones and thrombosis -- and competing claims for and against the safety of one product in particular, which is facing over 200 lawsuits. I was also administering a Joomla-based blog site for my investigative class' project on online pharmacies. Now I hope to be able to spend some time with php, MySQL, Perl, and a few other scripting languages in order to put some online news site ideas of mine into practice.

I also ride bicycles (well, one in particular right now) for transportation, exercise, and my own entertainment. I like to keep abreast of cycling news in cities and states across the U.S. and Canada. The development of law and popular opinion as it relates to cyclists is extremely interesting when you're one of them.

Some personal pre-me-being-on-Flickr albums:

Alaska Highway trip - 2006: In 2006 I took the ferry with my mom and two sisters from Bellingham to Alaska (Skagway, Alaksa, and then we drove back down to Vancouver, B.C. I didn't use Flickr then, so I made this page to show off the pictures I took.