When not climbing in the Alps or racing a carbon fiber Pinarello, I am an applied mathematician, geographic information systems scientist, and lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. I also teach courses in the ontological foundations and history of GIS, and the mathematics of deep learning, at University College London, and at Sorbonne Université - Campus Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris.

I am the founder and director of BIO-MAP AI, where we use complex bioinformatic and genomic data, machine learning, and advanced geographic information systems, to study the far-from-equilibrium and non-stationary transmission of zoonotic diseases and the movement patterns of their animal hosts.

Our current projects are centered on using wavelet and non-linear approximation methods to study the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, on trying to understand the medieval and early modern patterns of plague transmission in Europe and Eurasia from ancient DNA and archival sources, and on reconstructing the dynamics of the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in west Africa.

The Lab’s theoretical work concentrates on the application and development of signal processing techniques and algorithms, especially wavelets, to high-dimensional epidemiological geospatial time-series data.

Interested in the applications of machine learning in GIS environments, my mathematical research focuses on the foundations of deep learning. Specifically, on using renormalization group methods and Ising models, like the Wolff algorithm family of techniques, to study the foundations of deep neural networks, along with covariant and traditional gradient descent.

To preserve the history of computation, I founded the Relic-Code Lab, where our preservation work is dedicated to the reconstruction and conservation of historic software—programs, algorithms, and computational systems that have historically shaped our digital world, but which are now technologically inaccessible or materially endangered.

The Lab combines digital forensics, archival research, programming language history, and emulation to bring vanished computational objects back into view. We collaborate with libraries, museums, and archives to preserve fragile code and to document the intellectual, political, and social contexts that gave rise to these artifacts.

Current conservation projects center on reconstructing the code of the Simulmatics Corporation, who revolutionized computational election and voting trend analysis in the 1960s; on preserving materials from the early use of computers in US congressional redistricting; conserving the early mathematical proof assistant, the Logic Theorist; and working on emulating the code found in the seminal Harvard Papers in Theoretical Geography.

The author or editor of more than one hundred articles and books, including the New York Times bestseller and National Public Radio selection, MAP: Exploring the World, my latest articles, To save lives: lessons of a pandemic cartographer, was published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and Mapping the Last Pool of Darkness: a Tribute to Cartographer Tim Robinson (1935-2020), appeared in the Journal of the Washington Map Society, The Portolan.

Working on the logical and ontological foundations of point-free geometries, as a possible process and event based foundation for spatial computation and GIS, I am also writing mathematical commentaries on Alfred North Whitehead’s 1916, La Theorie Relationniste de L’Espace and William Lawvere's 1992, Categories of Space and Quantity.

A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (FRGS), I find being close to the gentle hum of supercomputers, pondering the. complexities of category theory, and exploring the deep labyrinths of the renormalization group, strangely comforting.

I currently live in Nice, France.