Music has always been a part of my life. Music is a gift, a wonderful mode of expression to tell story through melody, harmony, and rhythm. I was classically trained on alto saxophone, picked up the guitar when I was eighteen, and recently started vocal training and performance. In college, I had a rock cover band and played guitar at University Baptist Church in Baltimore, MD. Now in Cambridge, MA, I play and sing regularly at Hope Fellowship Church in Cambridge, MA. The video to the right is a rendition my friends and I put together of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24 performed at University Baptist Church in December, 2015.

On a sunny, August afternoon in 2011, I became a private pilot. Learning to fly has been one of the great joys of my life. However, an even greater joy was learning to land! If it were not for learning to fly, I do not think I would have been inspired to explore the human factors aspects of autonomy and robotics. I remember my first time turning on the autopilot. My instructor told me to pretend the airport at my destination was closed and that I would need to divert to a back-up airport. For the first time, my instructor said I could use the autopilot to help. Manually plotting a course change is a lot of work, so I chose to use the autopilot to fly the plane, offloading as much work as possible. I turned my head down and started plotting the course, and my instructor said, ``You still have to fly the plane!" I was so busy, and it was so convenient to blindly trust the autopilot, that I forgot the first rule of flying: aviate first, navigate second, and communicate third. This experience suddenly opened my eyes to the challenges of trust and reliance with human-machine systems and set me on a journey of research in human factors.