What I'm doing Now

Last updated 26 January 2026

This is a now page. It is a written version of what I might say if we met in person and you asked me what I'm up to. The date at the top is important: it helps the reader determine if this is a now page or a then page.

Big News

I am now a principal engineer at the Institutional Data Initiative at the Harvard Law School Library. Sometimes jobs are a touchy subject, but I note that I am happy to talk about any and all details of the process, the search, leaving academia, and so on.

Also: my family has just bought a house! Soon we'll live near Boston, instead of in Boston.

A year and a half ago, my wife and I had a daughter. She's adorable and perfect, she's walking and talking (though most words are made-up lyrics to wheels on the bus).

What do I do now?

You can think of my role as a split between a research software engineer and a principal data engineer. I write a lot of software. But I'm solving new problems across a few fields. I'm writing papers about some of the problems I'm solving.

I'm currently spending most of my time working on natural language processing problems. Coincidentally, this is exactly what my wife is really good at doing.

Here is a concrete problem I'm facing: I'm working with a library to clean up scans of books in 249 languages. It's important to us that we serve every language possible. But it turns out most modern tooling is aimed at English, and this is a problem.

Recent Travel and News

I'm typically near Boston/Cambridge.

2025 happenings

• I attended an LMFDB Workshop from July 14-18 at MIT.
• I was at LuCaNT from July 7-11 at ICERM.
• In May I went to a wedding and vacation in France. My daughter loves croissants and could not get enough.
• On April 22-23, I gave a colloqium at Swarthmore and a talk at the Philadelphia area number theory seminar.
• I was in Washington DC a couple of times in February and March.
• I applied for the AI for Math fund from Renaissance Philanthropy but did not get it.
• I gave a lightning talk at the Brown University Algebra seminar on February 3rd, too.
• I was in New York City January 15-18 for the annual meeting of the Simons collaboration. I gave a (different) lightning talk there.
• At the Joint Math Meetings in 2025, I coorganized a Special Session on Mathematics Informed by Computing.

2024 happenings

• On November 19th, I gave a seminar at LSU.
• During the week of November 11th to the 15th, I'll be at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics workshop on murmurations.
• In October, I spent a couple of weeks at Harvard's machine learning and math program (especially the number theory weeks).
• On April 22nd, I'm giving a talk at the Brown Algebra seminar.
• During the week of April 8th, I was in NYC. But not on April 8th, as I was actually in Vermont looking for totality in an eclipse. And it was awesome.
• During the week of April 1st, I was in Scotland.
• I was at Lean for the Curious Mathematician at CIRM.
• I co-organized of the session Arithmetic Geometry with a View towards Computation, at the Joint Math Meetings.
• During the week of January 8th, I was in NYC attending a conference on computational number theory at the Simons Foundation.

2023 happenings

• I am a co-organizer of a workshop that will be held at AIM from 4 December to 8 December, 2023: Open-source cyberinfrastructure supporting mathematics research. Our registration is filled up, but if you are interested in the broader problems, let me know. I'm sure there is lots to do.
• I was at Maine-Quebec (again) this year. It was wonderful seeing so many familiar faces.
• I was at Lucant from July 10th to July 14th, and at the Murmurations hot topic event the week before.
• I returned to Marseilles, France in early May.
• I was at AIM (in San Jose) in early March.
• I was in Marseilles, France from late February to early March.

2022 happenings

• I was at Maine-Quebec on October 15-16.
• I was at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics roughly from 24 October to 18 November. This is at Stony Brook, NY.
• I was at the LMFDB Modular Curves Workshop, even though it is in the middle of my stay at Stony Brook.
• I was at the Joint Math Meetings in Boston from 4 January to 7 January. I am not presenting this year.
• I was in New York City during the week of January 9th to January 13th. This includes attending the annual meeting of the Simons Foundation.