I entered the Phd. program in the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems. Now dissolved, it was founded by Stephen Grossberg, the father of Neural Networks, and ultimately the Computational Neuroscience Lab under Eric Schwartz who coined the term after his early work on the functional architecture of early vision.

My research focus was computer vision methods and novel signal processing techniques for non-linear and time-variant signals produced by biological systems in early vision processing (V1-V4). Approaches included analog circuit design, advances in Nonuniform Sampling and statistical methods to synthesize reconstructions of time-variant frames from discrete parallel input signals. Due to funding issues I left with a M.S. after completing my qualifying exam and the majority of coursework.

Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton Florida is a top-rated engineering and research institution best known for it's Ocean Engineering program. While accepted into the Ocean Engineering program I quickly transitioned into the Physics department and then the Mathematics department.

Physics

While completing the core curriculum I did research as an intern into high-temperature superconductors by programming Ising Models using Simulated Annealing to explore ideal packing configurations to validate experimental data and guide new experiments. This was done both on workstations and on massively parallel architectures like the MasPar.

Mathematics

Once I discovered Abstract Algebra I transitioned into the Mathematics department with Bernard and Carolyn Johnston as advisors and mentors. While completing the core curriculum I attented graduate classes and seminars in a variety of topics.

The Mathematics department also annually hosts the Southeastern International Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory & Computing. As a volunteer I had the great fortune to meet a variety of fascinating people including: Drinking with John Conway, prevented Paul Erdos from stealing a much-prized new textbook, met Ronald Graham, and Mandelbrot's personal programmer who created many initial visualizations of his work and had great stories, among many others. (Fun fact - Mandlebrot hated computers!)

The University of Warwick is a top-rated Mathematics institution located in Coventry England. My advisors and the Mathematics department organized a year abroad towards the end of my undergraduate program at FAU. Upon completion I was offered a place in the newly formed Applied Mathematics department for graduate studies. I declined for personal reasons and to ultimately enter industry.