I was born in Kingston, NY, but my family made stops in Pittsburgh, PA, and Raleigh, NC, before settling in Stone Mountain, GA, a suburb of Atlanta.  For high school I attended Forrest Hills Christian, where I earned letters in football, basketball, baseball, and track.  During my senior year I was the Most Valuable Defensive Player for our undefeated football team, which won the 1987 Georgia Christian Athletic Association state championship, and set a school record by catching four touchdown passes in one game.

In the fall of 1988 I began my collegiate studies as a mathematics major at Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA.  While at Liberty I spent two summers working on a Liberty-based team on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, a very primitive island of only a few thousand mostly native Hawaiian residents.  During these summers we conducted several week-long overnight camps for children on Molokai, as well as single week-long overnight camps for children on the more "touristy" islands of Kauai and Maui.

In the fall of 1992 I began my graduate studies at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where I completed an M.S. in Applied Mathematics in 1994 and a Ph.D. in the same field in 1997.  After graduating I stayed at NC State as a visiting instructor for a couple of years, during which time I was responsible for establishing a permanent technology component for the calculus sequence at the university, and wrote a book entitled Applications of Abstract Algebra with Maple with Drs. Neil Sigmon of Radford University and Ernie Stitzinger of NC State.  Neil, Ernie, and I recently completed an expanded second edition of this book, now entitled Applications of Abstract Algebra with Maple and MATLAB.

I left NC State in the spring of 1999 to accept a position as a cryptologic mathematician with the National Security Agency at Fort George G. Meade, MD.  I held this position until the fall of 2000, when I accepted a position as a visiting assistant professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, a town located on the southern shore of Lake Ontario about 40 miles north of Syracuse.

I left Oswego in the fall of 2002 to accept a position as an assistant professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, where I am now an associate professor.  While at Appalachian State I wrote a book entitled The Mathematics of Voting and Elections: A Hands-On Approach with Dr. Jon Hodge of Grand Valley State University.  This book has since been translated and published in Russian.  In July and September of 2005, Jon and I were guests on The Edge hosted by Tom Smith on WXYB in Tampa, FL, to discuss some topics related to the mathematics of election theory.  Click here for an MP3 file of our interview that aired in July, and here for an MP3 file of our interview that aired in September.

In the spring of 2005 I married Dr. Vicky Williams (now Vicky Klima), who is also an associate professor at Appalachian State University.  Our son Marshall made us a family of three in the fall of 2009.  We live happily ever after in the historic downtown district of Boone just a short walk from the campus of Appalachian State with our dogs Sophie and Allie, and our cats Shmoopy and Shmoopy.  Click here to see some pictures.