Harvard University, A.B. cum laude class of 2009

       Joint concentration in Archaeology and Linguistics

I began as a joint concentrator between Classical Languages and Linguistics. During that time I studied Latin and Ancient Greek, as well as the various sub-fields of Linguistics, with a particular focus on Historical Linguistics and Phonetics and Phonology. I subsequently transitioned to a joint Archaeology and Linguistics concentration. In that area, my interests lay primarily in ancient writing systems, and the archaeology of the Ancient Near East. I was able to pursue a complete sequence of courses to learn Middle Egyptian, and even participate in a 10 week archaeological dig in el-Hemmeh, Jordan!

In my senior year, I completed my thesis Representations of Pottery in Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs under the supervision of Drs. Denise Doxey, Marc Zender, and Jay Jasanoff. My thesis built on the work of Dr. Orly Goldwasser, on the parallels between the Linnaean taxonomy for flora and fauna and the hierarchy of Egyptian determinatives for plants and animals. I wanted to see whether this finding might be true of other classes of determinatives, such as those for ceramic and stone vessels. However, similarly deep hierarchies were not found, instead there were competing determinatives based on vessel shape, material, and usage.

University of Toronto, B.A.Sc. class of 2015 Engineering Science,

       Nanotechnology Option

Within the Engineering Science program, I gained exposure to many Engineering disciplines. The first two years are a general program that focus on learning the scientific and mathematical underpinnings of most work in Engineering. For the last two years, I specialised in the Nanotechnology option, which works closely with the Materials Science Department.

Some of the projects I completed in this program are: a robot for sorting and packaging dowels, a self-sorting binary search tree built in C, and a safe enclosure for an X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy device used by students in the Physics Department. Although most of our work was highly directed, when presented with a bit more freedom, I pursued projects that better intergrated all my interests. These included composition analysis of a potsherd by a Germanium detector, and presentations on the microanalysis of bronze tool artifacts from Spain and the Lycurgus Cup.

For my senior thesis, I launched a project to develop a character recognition tool for handwritten Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Currently, it is in the data collection step, however, the completed tool will likely use the “One-Shot Learning” technique for machine learning developed by Drs. Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Brenden Lake.