About

I am a native of Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of a career Army National Guardsman and an in-home piano teacher, and younger brother to a (now) preschool teacher. I grew up in the comfortable middle-class, with every advantage and resource that I needed to succeed. My educational journey took me through the excellent Lincoln Public Schools system (1992 graduate, Lincoln East High School), and then to Nebraska Wesleyan University, where I graduated in 1996 as the president of my class, with dual degrees in English and Theatre Arts. I obtained a Masters degree in Drama from Washington University in St. Louis in 2000, and ultimately, a Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009. 

The Great Recession of that time necessitated a slight change in career plans, which brought me to Lehigh University as the Executive Assistant to the President in March 2010. Alongside was my wife Joanna, a theatre artist herself and adjunct professor at Muhlenberg College, Cedar Crest College, DeSales University, and Lehigh, and our now-12 year old daughter, currently a 7th grader at Lower Macungie Middle School (EHS class of ‘26!). With no family ties to the Lehigh Valley, and no prior knowledge of the area, we settled in Emmaus, where we live to this day.

I kept my original position at Lehigh University until 2016, along the way taking opportunities as an adjunct professor of theatre at Lehigh and Cedar Crest College. Just as I was looking for the next step in my higher education career path, Lehigh created an entirely new office, the Office of Creative Inquiry, spinning off the innovative Mountaintop Summer Experience program that had begun in 2013. The mandate of the Office of Creative Inquiry was, and is, to create unique, best-in-class, experiential research and project opportunities for Lehigh students, and I was fortunate enough to be hired as the Administrative Director of the office, working alongside Vice Provost Khanjan Mehta, beginning in January 2017.

In those four years we have created a dozen new programs in Creative Inquiry, all with the same goals in mind: facilitating the growth of essential 21st-century skill sets, mindsets, and portfolios of accomplishment for Lehigh students; supporting faculty-guided, student-driven interdisciplinary projects, all of which strive for real-world impact; and positioning Lehigh to sit at the forefront of redesigning higher education. I am proud of what we have accomplished so far and look forward to the opportunity to create more innovative programs in the future.

In my spare time, I nerd out on movies, sports, puzzles, books, and music, all of which my wife and daughter not only put up with but somehow facilitate. I manage to be a functioning husband and father too, and as a family we love game nights, walking our dog Maggie, petting our cat Yvain, Carolina basketball, table tennis, road trips (before and after the pandemic), and laughing at weird stuff. We are a vegetarian family (with the occasional fish dish) and increasingly a basketball family, as our daughter plays for LMMS and local AAU teams and intends to continue playing for as long as she can. We will cheer her on every step of the way.