Growing up in Earlysville, I was fascinated by the world around me. How do ants explore so far, yet make their way back to their nests? How do video games work? Why do the stars in the night sky change position?
I devoured episodes of the PBS science show NOVA and eagerly took a kid’s computer programming class from the University of Virginia. In high school, I joined Charlottesville’s FIRST Robotics team (sponsored by UVA), where I learned about mechanical engineering and robotics. I also did an independent study with a member of Virginia Tech’s DARPA Urban Challenge team, learning about technologies in self-driving cars, and took classes on mathematics from Piedmont Virginia Community College (PVCC).
I am fortunate to have grown up in a city where my family could engage me with so many opportunities to learn about science — opportunities that paved the way to me becoming a scientist as an adult. The experiences I had taking programming classes and learning about robotics greatly strengthened my college applications, giving me the chance of a lifetime to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after my graduation from Albemarle High School in 2007. After MIT, I went on to earn my Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and today, I work as a research scientist at Google DeepMind where I study how to make artificial intelligence systems more trustworthy, reliable and useful.
