(See Projects story on Risk Management.)

Where are you from?
The South. I grew up in central Virginia, lived in South Carolina for about 10 years, then went to graduate school in Texas for another 7 years.

How did you get interested in your field of study?
I took a lot of classes in math, computer science, physics, and chemistry, and finally realized I liked sport computing and slick mathematics applied to real world industrial problems. I ended up in Operations Research, which lets me combine my interests in probability, super computing and high performance computing, simulation, and so forth.

How did you end up at R&D?
By accident. Being from the South, I did not know GM had an R&D Center. GM traditionally did not recruit from Texas A&M University, even though it is a Top 5 Industrial Engineering Operations Research Program. Anyway, I was at a technical conference, and Jeff Alden, who was heading up the Production Systems Research Group at R&D, asked me to interview. I decided to interview out of curiosity. I was really surprised and delighted with the people and the caliber of research going on within GM. It's been a lot of fun so far. Detroit is a very cool city.

What were your early assignments?
I've been at GM R&D less than 2 years. My first major research project was to explore financial implications of agile machining systems for GM. While working on that project, I was poking around in risk analysis work, and connected with GM Corporate Risk Management, a group that wanted some help with probabilistic modeling of risks.

What are you working on now?
Strategic supply chain risk analysis. I'm examining how to model the GM manufacturing enterprise, exploring the frequency and severity of business interruption events - anything that interrupts production operations - and considering strategic mitigation options that can reduce GM's risk exposure.

What excites you about your research?
Combining ideas from different subject areas, like math, computer science, statistics, and operations research, to develop novel modeling approaches and solutions for large-scale problems.

What are you most proud of?
That I have survived two winters in Michigan so far. I had forgotten while living in Texas how much I dislike snow and cold weather.

What is your work like life?
I'm working in multiple locations right now. I work with the risk guys downtown at GM World Headquarters and with other researchers at the GM R&D Center. It's a little crazy but it suits me. I'm pretty high energy, and don't sit still for very long.

What are your other research interests?
Computational probability, decision making under uncertainty (risk and warranty models), high performance and super computing, numerical linear algebra.

What do you do when you're not working?
Waste excess energy at the gym. I am also a diehard Atlanta Braves fan so I watch a lot of their games.