About Me

I build secure, high-performance distributed systems.

I tend to understand complex systems in terms of primitives that compete in a Darwinian sense for inclusion in the architectures we construct. The best primitives survive because they are simple, composable, measurable, and defensible. I enjoy discovering, building, benchmarking, and advocating for the adoption of strong primitives to overcome technical and economic constraints in real systems.

While generative AI will continue to compress the cost of producing software, durable primitives, especially those protected by intellectual property, hardware constraints, or network effects, will remain the essential building blocks of scalable systems. I believe verifiable computing technologies, such as those we developed at Blocky, are foundational for building large networks of AI-orchestrated services that can be trusted, composed, and economically sustained.

Blocky #

I co-founded Blocky in 2018 and served as its Chief Scientist before becoming CEO in 2025.

With support from the NSF SBIR Phase I and Phase II grants, MSU Tech Transfer, and venture capital, we built a verifiable computing platform that enabled our clients to create custom blockchain oracles. Our use of trusted execution environments (TEEs) allowed us to provide verifiable serverless compute and a patented verifiable ledger services several orders of magnitude less expensive than competing solutions.

We also prototyped the use our tooling for verifiable MCP tool integrations, enabling AI agents to invoke external services with cryptographic guarantees of integrity.

Montana State University #

I was a Computer Science faculty at the Gianforte School of Computing at Montana State University from 2011 to 2022.

I led the Networks and Systems Lab where my students, collaborators, and I worked on dynamic computation checkpointing, content delivery, digital voice transmission and recognition, real-time LoRa communications, measurement of blockchain oracles, cloud compute platforms, web page image density and critical load paths, internet latency, interpersonal trust, and cognitive workload assessment for human-robot collaboration and multiplayer gaming.

Across these projects I focused on identifying core systems primitives,
rigorously measuring their behavior, and translating those findings into
production infrastructure deployed at enterprises such as
Akamai and startups including
Beartooth.

UC Santa Barbara #

I have received my PhD in Computer Science from the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I was advised by Kevin Almeroth and Elizabeth Belding.

My doctoral work focused on using local information in routing problems with networks with dynamically changing link pricing, social networks, developing regions, and hybrid wireless networks.