Biography

Finding Mathematics

I came to mathematics later than most. In 2018, at the age of 25, I moved to Kelowna, British Columbia, a small city nestled in the Okanagan Valley, and enrolled at The University of British Columbia (UBC) to pursue an undergraduate degree in Mathematics. Starting university later in life brought its own challenges, but it also meant I arrived with a clarity of purpose that has shaped everything since.

Master's Research

After completing my undergraduate degree, I purchased a home in Kelowna and decided to continue at UBC for my Master's degree. It was during this time that I began working with Dr. John R.J. Thompson, a collaboration that would come to define my research trajectory. My Master's research focused on distance metric learning for mixed-type data in distance-based clustering. I developed methods that incorporated nonparametric kernel density estimation to learn distances across heterogeneous data types (continuous, nominal, and ordinal data). These distances were designed for the purpose of clustering algorithms to operate more naturally on the kinds of messy, real-world datasets that rarely conform to a single data type. I received my Master's degree in Mathematics in 2024.

Doctoral Research

Toward the end of my Master's, Dr. Thompson and I discussed the directions I wanted to take my doctoral work. He saw merit in the ideas I proposed and encouraged me to continue under his supervision. I am now in my second year of my PhD, where my research spans two interrelated areas.

The first area of research focusses on variable weighting techniques for heterogeneous variables. The goal is to quantify similarities and dissimilarities appropriately for distance-based soft clustering algorithms - methods that assign probabilistic, rather than hard, memberships to clusters. This work extends the mixed-type framework I developed during my Master's.

The second, and primary focus of my PhD, is fairness-aware clustering. Traditional clustering methods are agnostic to the social context of the data they process. When historical biases are embedded in the data, these methods can encode and perpetuate structural disparities affecting marginalized populations. My work draws on perspectives from social theory, philosophy, and sociology to develop clustering techniques that explicitly account for these biases, correcting for them through distributional constraints grounded in statistical theory. The goal is to produce clusters that are not only statistically coherent but also equitable, ensuring that neither groups nor individuals are systematically disadvantaged by algorithmic decisions.

In 2025, entering my second year, Dr. Warren Hare joined as a co-supervisor. His expertise in optimization has been an invaluable addition, particularly as my fairness-aware methods rely on optimization-based formulations for distributional correction.

Collaborations & Conferences

In May 2026, I travelled to Hamilton, Ontario to work under the guidance of Dr. Paul McNicholas, a renowned researcher in mixture models and clustering methodology at McMaster University.

Throughout my Master's and PhD, I have had the privilege of presenting and discussing my work at leading statistics conferences internationally, including meetings in New York (NY, USA), Vancouver (BC, Canada), St. John's (NL, Canada), London (United Kingdom), and Sevilla (Spain). My 2026 conference schedule includes presentations in Hamilton (ON, Canada) and Milan (Italy).

Beyond the Research

Outside of academia, I try to stay active through hiking, running, and a general commitment to healthy living (the Okanagan makes that easy). I have a profound love of travelling and exploring new places. Languages are a particular passion of mine. I am currently taking Spanish lessons with the goal of sitting the DELE examination, and I hope to eventually learn Czech, German, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, and Greek, among others. Most of my time at home, though, is spent with my Doberman, Zara (three years old and entirely convinced she runs the household), and my amazing partner of nearly nine years.