I am very proud of my buddy John S. who had his first PhD committee meeting at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I meet John in 2007 when I started a new job in Raleigh, North Carolina. We worked MANY late nights together and formed a life-long friendship. He is about a decade younger than I am so, while he is younger then me, I could not say that he is young. One night when I was about a third of the way into my PhD program, we got into a conversation about what I was doing. He thought he might like to do something like that, too, so I connected him up with my professor Troy G. To make a long story short, they talked, he applied to the program and has been working on it ever since. He has had a HUGE impact on our area of research. I have to say that is significantly greater than my own research. I did perform the prototype work for his research topic, but he has taken it wildly beyond what I did or even imagined. I think he is about half-way through his program now, has been instrumental in helping to secure grants for Troy and is on the way to very big things in the area of ground-based imagery analysis and machine learning/artificial intelligence for ecology and hydrology. His committee meeting went really well. We are all very much looking forward to where his research leads.
