I was born and raised in the suburbs of
Washington, DC—Bethesda,
MD to be exact. I went through the Montgomery County Public School
System from beginning to end, attending first Grosvenor and then
Ashburton Elementary Schools. Many of my close friends today actually
date back to Grosvenor and Ashburton, and to our neighborhood swim
team,
which I swam on every summer from the age of 6.
While attending
Walter
Johnson High School, I swam on the swim team, studied piano,
captained the math team,
competed for the Montgomery County Math Team., and worked as an intern
at the
National
Institutes
of Health, but decided that there was too much trial and error in
biology for my tastes, and began gravitating more toward math and
astrophysics. At
Williams
College, I continued to study math and physics, and interned
for two summers at the
Naval
Research Lab (
solar physics
branch) in
Washington, DC, but nevertheless went on to major in
Mathematics.
Being
the upstanding liberal arts student that I was, however, I continued
to take other classes as well,
and
during second semester of senior year, I took Intermediate
Macroeconomics.
I was immediately impressed with the novelty, youth, and fertility of
economics as a research discipline, relative to math and physics, and
spent the summer after college (after cycling through Europe with
several friends from high
school) frantically reading through economics research journals to see
if the field was worth switching into. I decided that
it was, and began taking economics classes on top of the first-year
graduate sequence in math at
Stanford
University, where I had
already accepted admission into the
Mathematics
Ph.D. program. While in the
Economics Department at
Stanford, I focused primarily on Macroeconomics, but also remained very
interested in Monetary Economics and Econometrics.
After graduating from Stanford, I returned to Washington to do
research in Monetary and Macroeconomics at the
Federal
Reserve Board. I bought a small townhouse on Capitol Hill,
which had plenty of room to spare at the time, but after meeting my
wife Hyun, getting married, and having two children (Andrew and Julia,
above), we're now finding ourselves bursting out at the seams.
As of this writing, Andrew and Julia are 24 months and 7 months old,
respectively. Andrew's favorite activities include reading
stories with Daddy, playing with his toy toolbox,
and doing anything outside. Julia's favorite activities include
crawling like a commando and sucking on her feet. Hyun's favorite
activities (when she's not working at
AES)
include playing
tennis and shopping. When I'm not
doing work or entertaining the babies (which together take up about
105% of my time), I like to exercise, travel, read, hack
on
the computer, and spend time outdoors, whether it be hiking, biking,
working in the garden, or just relaxing with a good book.
(More Family Photos)
