A little info about me……I was born and raised in New York, a little more than an hour northwest of New York City.  An easy way to locate where I was raised is by finding the point where New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania come together.  I was an avid “sports kid” growing up, engaging in some sort of athletics year-round.  My favorite sports as a child were definitely football and basketball, but as I reached high school I switched from playing basketball to competing in track and field.  Football and track were very important to me in high school and I was blessed enough to perform well in both sports.  As a high-school senior, our football team won Divisional and Sectional Championships, but we unfortunately lost in the State Tournament.  I had a similar fate in track that season, with early season performances that were (and still are) school records, but a mishap during practice caused me to suffer a back injury that made me miss the last half of the season.

            After High School, I accepted an academic scholarship to attend Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI with ambitions of double-majoring in marine biology and psychology.  At that time, my career goals were to pursue a doctoral degree in marine biology with a special focus on understanding how marine mammals communicate with one another.  During the course of my first year at RWU, I began to realize that chemistry, biology, ichthyology, genetics, and all the other courses that were necessary for a career in marine biology were not of great interest to me.  Due to this, I started to become dissatisfied with my career plans, but thankfully during the spring semester of my second year at RWU I took a course in cognitive psychology taught by Dr. Garrett Berman.  Throughout the semester, Dr. Berman helped me realize the passion I had for understanding our cognitive processes with a special focus on how these processes influence our interactions with the legal system.  From that semester on, my focus shifted towards pursuing a career in legal psychology.  I finished up my career at RWU and decided to take a year off before heading to graduate school.

            During my time off from school I used my B.A. in Psychology to work in an emergency psychiatric hospital in New York.  My time at this hospital further solidified my desires to pursue a career investigating cognitive processes and not dealing with mental illness.  After about a year at the hospital, I quit due to dissatisfaction with the job.  Within two weeks of resigning my position at the hospital, I was married and began working as a car salesman in New York.  At the time, I decided to put my career goals on the “back-burner” for a while and work to establish a home for myself and my new wife.  As you may imagine, once you begin going down one path it is often difficult to change things up.  I found myself becoming more and more dedicated to my job and the aspirations I had for pursuing a career in legal psychology were being pushed further and further away.  It took the unthinkable attack on innocents on 9/11 to bring those aspirations back to the fore-front in my mind and immediately after that fateful day, I started applying to graduate programs and eventually accepted an offer from Ball State University in Muncie, IN.

            While earning my M.A. in Cognitive and Social Processes from BSU, I worked as a research assistant studying psycholinguistics and artificial intelligence with Dr. Tom Holtgraves.  Unfortunately, the stipend provided by the university was not large enough for my wife and I to live on, so immediately after moving to Indiana I began working security at a nightclub, eventually moving up to be a bartender and, finally, bar manager.  During the same time, I volunteered the free time I had to assist Dr. Kerri Pickel with research she was conducting on the weapon focus effect (WFE).  The WFE is a tendency for individuals that are witnesses or victims of a crime committed by an armed perpetrator to focus on the weapon the perpetrator is holding and not the perpetrator him or herself.  This leads to the victim/witness having a poorer memory for the perpetrator and, therefore, being of less help to police investigators.  (For more information on this research, you can download a copy of the article here).  Dr. Pickel was also the chair on my master’s committee where I investigated the potential for suggestiveness in show-ups (single person lineups) presented by uniformed police officers. 

            In my last semester at BSU, I accepted an offer to attend UTEP and work in the Eyewitness Identification Research Laboratory under the direction of Dr. Roy Malpass.  Since my arrival in August ’04 I’ve worked extensively in the laboratory conducting research on legal authoritarianism, lineup procedures, and eyewitness memory, as well as working as a graduate consultant on numerous legal cases throughout the United States.  I continue to work on numerous research projects (see my “current research” page for more info) and have recently completed a field placement with the El Paso Police Department.  In this placement, I collaborated with the Crimes Against Persons unit of the EPPD with the goal of understanding what procedures they use and how we, as researchers, can assist them with implementing the most efficient procedures.  In the course of this collaboration I developed a training program for investigators on the eyewitness evidence collection procedures recommended by scientific research in the field.  In addition to my work in the EIRL and with the EPPD, I have continued to progress in the development of my dissertation which is designed to investigate the information used by individuals when making facial similarity judgments in criminal justice contexts. 

            My work in the EIRL, my field placement at the EPPD, and the development of my dissertation have kept me quite busy, however when I get some free time I enjoy engaging in the activities I grew up with.  I work out about 4-5 times a week and still love sports (however much of my involvement in sports nowadays is in the “spectator” role).  On weekends during football season, you can find me tailgating before home football games or relaxing at home with a good BBQ and friends while that weekend's games are playing on multiple TVs.  While football tends to take care of any free time I have on the weekends between August and February, I prefer spending my free time in the remaining months a couple dozen feet below the water while scuba diving.  My wife and I recently returned from a trip to the Great Barrier Reef off of Australia where we spent a few days living on a boat on the reef and diving (and earning our advanced scuba certification in the process).  If you'd like to see some of the pics from our trip, click here.  In my opinion there's not much more enjoyable in the world than being weightless in the peaceful surroundings of the water.  My next goal is to continue my scuba education to earn a rescue diver certification. 

            Other than that, there's not much more to know about me (or at least what's worth putting in print on here).  Please check out the other pages on my site and find out more about my research and what I'm up to currently.