Bio

I grew up¹[some old pictures of me]]] in Madison, Wisconsin and studied art and physics at the University of Wisconsin — Madison, receiving my doctorate in physics there in 1996 under Prof. Francis Halzen. I also worked for a year at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, under Prof. Sau Lan Wu on the ALEPH experiment.

My doctoral work and postdoc focused on the AMANDA neutrino detector constructed at the Geographic South Pole, and the subsequent, much larger IceCube Neutrino Observatory. My physics career is described in more depth in my Curriculum Vitae; the IceCube project is described quite engagingly and at length by Mark Bowen in his book, The Telescope in the Ice: Inventing a New Astronomy at the South Pole.

While in graduate school I also studied painting, drawing and printmaking in the UW-Madison graduate art program, mostly with Jack Damer, Richard Long and David H. Becker.

In the 21st century I have been a software engineer and painter. I travelled to the Geographic South Pole ten times for AMANDA and IceCube, going at first as a physicist, and then as a software consultant (blog posts here). Some of my early paintings were described in William Fox's book, Terra Antarctica: Looking Into the Emptiest Continent.

Since 2015 I have maintained a regular studio practice focusing on figurative art based on observation and imagination. This effort has involved some re-training, mostly in the form of workshops at the Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Art with Andrew S. Conklin, Stephen Assael, and Larry Paulsen. My exhibition history is here, while recent work and work in progress are shown on my Instagram and Tumblr feeds.