About Me -- Biography, Hobbies, School/Work
Here are the quick links to different sections: Biography and
Description, Hobbies, Interests, and Links (on
a separate page, but there are quick links here),
School and Work Information, and
Awards My Pages Have Won (on a separate page).
For a little background information, I'm in my 30s and I grew up in New Jersey,
basically south across the bay from New York City. I'm now living in
Maryland near Washington, D.C. I'm married and do have pictures of myself,
but prefer not to post them here. If you really want one, let me know
why and I'll consider sending you a copy. :) You can check out my list of
interests below.
A bit about my personality: pretty good sense of humor (if weird at
times), sometimes a little shy but not really
after I get to know someone, romantic (I'd say), a bit hooked on
chivalry and honor and stuff like that; I guess
I'm kind of old-fashioned. I also love learning and am usually willing to
try out new things (within reason). I've also added
in my geek codes for the last few versions
of the code. I should also mention that I haven't updated the older versions
of the code since I made them, which would be at roughly the time they were
released, and the newest version of the code is probably kind of old, too.
The official site is
geekcode.com, but there's also some
info on
Yahoo's Geek Code.
Yahoo also has a page with links to
other codes
done in the same fashion. The
A Word A Day home page and mailing
list is a fun way to learn the meaning of a new word every weekday. I've also
found that the Desiderata has some very good
advice; I like some of the ancient eastern classics like the
Tao Te Ching
and the
I Ching
for the same reason. And, BTW, you don't have to divine with the I Ching
either, though I've had one particularly interesting experience making
readings in that fashion (ask me about it if you like), the whole book is essentially just generally good advice.
About my family: besides my parents (obviously) and my wife mentioned above,
I have two siblings and some nieces and nephews. I also have two parakeets (budgies) that I got from my brother when his two parakeets had babies --
they're named
Ruffles
and
Sprite.
When I used to live with my parents, we had dogs around, almost all of them
Newfoundlands. But right now, I only have the two birds.
OK, I think that's enough background information about me. Now on to my
interests and the rest of the links.
Here are some of my hobbies, interests, etc. They should be roughly ordered
by current level of interest, but that varies, and I rarely change the order
here. I moved this entire section over to its own page because this page was
starting to get rather large as I added more interests and links to it.
Having two pages now should allow you to load the pages faster and hopefully
find things a bit faster as well.
So, the links below are quick links to the appropriate topic on a separate
page. If you prefer, you can just go to my interests,
hobbies, links, etc. page and scroll around from there. Here's the
list of topics:
High School and College
High school usually isn't too important once you've gone to college, but I
just found a web page for mine, so I'm adding a link for it. I graduated
from Raritan High
School as the first in my class in 1992. I then went on to college at
Villanova University and graduated
summa cum laude (with highest honors) in 1996 with a BS in astronomy and
astrophysics and a physics minor. For more info on the departments, check
out the
VU astronomy or
VU physics home pages. I was part
of the Villanova
Astronomical Society (VAS) while at V.U. I was also inducted into three
honor societies there --
Sigma Pi Sigma for physics,
Phi Kappa Phi, a universal one
covering all fields of study, and
Phi Beta Kappa for the arts and sciences.
You can find out some more about each of these societies by going to my
honor society information page. I also found a
page on Phi Beta Kappa
at Villanova University with information specific to the chapter I was
inducted into. Related to the Sigma Pi Sigma honor society is
the Society of Physics
Students. Since graduating, I joined the
Villanova Online
Alumni Community; other VU graduates might want to check it out and join
as well. You might also want to check out the
Villanova Alumni Association
online.
College Research Experience
The astronomy program at Villanova is excellent and I was able to obtain
some practical research experience. I am a co-author on 8 publications from
that time period: two abstracts in the
BAAS --
1993, Vol. 25, No. 4 and 1996, Vol. 28, No. 1;
IAU Circular 5770;
and IBVS Bulletins 4101,
4161, 4229, 4362, 4363. My undergrad research advisor was
Dr.
Edward Guinan, and the above publications were all done with him.
I also assisted a professor on an observing run at Kitt Peak, and participated
in an observing run at IUE headquarters with one of my professors. (There's
some IUE information available at the
Multimission Archive at Space
Telescope.) As a junior member of the
American Astronomical Society (AAS) I
presented poster papers at the January 1994 and January 1996 AAS meetings.
My undergrad research work has included the study of a supernova (SN 1993J),
binary stars as tests of general relativity (DI Herculis, V541 Cygni, and
V1143 Cygni), and flare stars (HD 1405, HD 220140, and HD 17925) as part of
my senior research project.
Graduate School
I then went on to attend graduate school at the
University of Maryland in College Park
to work on advanced degrees in
astronomy.
I earned my MS degree in May 1999 after passing the PhD qualifying exam and
completing classwork and a second year research project. That was a
theoretical project done with
Dr. Eve Ostriker on the
modeling of stars in young clusters (primarily for the Orion Nebula Cluster),
studying their dynamics with N-body simulations, and trying to figure out how
they form and evolve and of course if the theoretical calculations match the
observations available. While it would have been nice to have gotten further
than I did, since I changed areas for my dissertation, I didn't do any
additional work on that project, and that work was not published.
After a total of 8.5 years in graduate school, I finally earned my PhD in
December 2004. The full citation and abstract plus a 24 page preview are available from
ProQuest. They'll sell you printed copies if you want them, and I can actually
get royalties from sales there if enough copies are sold, though I expect
that's rather unlikely. If you want a copy and can't get it easily by other
means, let me know and maybe I can get you a copy of the PDF; it's around
40MB though, so it's not exactly an easy transfer for me to make.
My dissertation advisor was
Dr. Stacy McGaugh
and I worked on a survey of very low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies.
The observations were made before I started on the project, so my job was
to reduce, calibrate, and analyze the data. The detection of LSB galaxies
was the main goal, creating a catalog of objects that can be used to plan
follow-up observations and future studies. For the science, we mainly
studied the surface brightness distribution and performed the necessary
corrections to turn the observed distribution into the intrinsic one and
found that it was consistent with being flat, extending previous work in
this area. We also looked at relationships between certain galaxy properties
and compared our observations with previous work.
A few years ago I made a small
montage image of some of the galaxies we
detected on one of the first fields I was looking at. It's an old image and
this exact image is not in the dissertation, but it does give you an idea of
what I was looking for -- the galaxies are the faint, fuzzy objects near or
at the center of each box. Fun stuff, huh? :)
I presented a poster paper on this work at the January 2004 AAS meeting, and
since I'm not sure when/if the resulting catalog and science work may make it
to publication in the academic journals, I've put the
catalog of objects
in the selected sample up in web page form on another account of mine to
avoid hitting the bandwidth quotas on Geocities (it's a large file, and quotas
here are kind of low). I'm not actively working on this at the moment though.
BTW, the Maryland TerpNation
is similar to the VU alumni network above, but I don't use it much since it
was my grad school (it's just different from undergrad).
Work
After school comes working in the "real world". I started looking for jobs
in fall 2003, about 1 year before I planned to graduate. I started with
primarily post-docs and fellowships which is pretty standard when you're
following the path towards an academic tenure-track position. After my
defense in August 2004, I decided to stop applying for research positions
because I didn't really want to do that sort of work again immediately.
I shifted gears towards teaching jobs or anything else that wouldn't involve
heavy research. In May 2005, I was contacted by
Innovim about a Software Engineer
position they had open. They liked my science background and were apparently
looking for that more so than a straight computer scientist, so when I got
an offer, I accepted it. It's a bit of a change, especially since the work
is more in the Earth science field, but it's good opportunity that's helping
to develop my computer skills. I work at the
Goddard Space
Flight Center, part of NASA, only a
few miles away from where I currently live. I was originally hired to work on
a Software Reuse project (and
still do), but since then, smaller amounts of my time have been allocated to
two other projects -- doing some programming and web development for an element
of the
NPOESS Preparatory Project
and providing some assistance to the systems engineering team, and assisting
in the development of a new version of the
MACUV web site for ozone data and
information, which should go live soon and is basically a new version of the
TOMS web site. I also joined the
American Geophysical Union (AGU) and
Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers, Inc. (IEEE) since we've been presenting posters and papers
at their conferences, and rejoined the
American Astronomical Society (AAS) to help
maintain contact with the professional astronomy world. Hopefully Innovim
will grow into getting space science contracts, something I think they would
like to do eventually, and I may get a chance to get back into astronomy
research work again, which would be nice. While I'm giving the update, I ought
to thank Monster.com as well, since I
think that's where Innovim found my CV/resume. If you want to see my resume,
e-mail me and let me know why you're interested, and maybe I'll send you a
copy.
Closing Notes
Well, I think that's plenty of information for now. If you really need to
know more, then you're going to have to e-mail me (see below) and ask for
specific information. But for now, go on back to
my main/index page or over to the links and
start looking around! ;)
James Marshall
dronak@yahoo.com
(plain ASCII text only, please,
here's why)
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views of myself, James Marshall, and in no way, neither explicit nor implied,
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