Santa Maria's City Hall
The ancestral home in Geneva, NE
The UC Santa Barbara campus
The Barcelona harbor
A walkway at the University of Barcelona
A clock tower in Gràcia
Pepperdine University's Malibu campus
About Me
Origins
I grew up bilingual and bicultural on California's beautiful Central Coast. My father was born in México and my mother is a California native of European descent who can trace her ancestry in America back to the Revolutionary War.
Education
I went to college at the University of California Santa Barbara, where I majored in Linguistics and studied several foreign languages, including Mandarin, Japanese, and Arabic. I was fortunate to spend my fourth year studying at the University of Barcelona and living in the beautiful little Barcelona neighborhood of Gràcia. After my graduation from UCSB, I spent several years in the working world, primarily with UCLA's Fusion Energy Sciences Center. During that time, I completed an M.A. in Psychology at Pepperdine University.
Doctoral Study
By the time I graduated from Pepperdine,
I had been admitted to doctoral study in the Clinical Psychology Training Program at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. My research at UNL is in the Rainbow Project, doing research that concerns lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people. I have also worked for the University of Nebraska's Public Policy Center, researching ways to improve children's mental health services under the multimillion-dollar federal State Infrastructure Grant. I assess and treat clients in the Department's Psychological Consultation Center, which is unusual among clinics of its type in that it is essentially a full-service outpatient community psychology clinic. UNL clinical Ph.D. students are also unusual in that we serve as junior clinicians in a number of community externships. In 2007, I served as an extern at the Lincoln Regional Center, a state mental hospital primarily serving patients with serious mental illness (SMI). Currently, I serve at Whitehall, a state-run residential adolescent sex offender treatment program. In both placements, the focus has been on comprehensive assessment, though at Whitehall I also run groups and occasionally see patients on an individual basis, as well as assisting with some program-evaluation and performance-improvement projects.
Home and Family
I currently reside with my wife and daughter in the Russian Bottoms neighborhood of Lincoln, Nebraska, which is where the "Germans from Russia" or Russlanddeutsche settled when they came to this region. Two cats grudgingly allow us to share the house with them, as long as we don't forget to feed them.
In My Copious Spare Time
When time allows—which it all too often doesn't—I brew beer, cook, play with my cats, read voraciously on all subjects, fiddle with computers and/or the Internet, and argue with people about politics, religion, history, and anything else that's fun to argue about. When time and money allow, my wife and I go on road trips or, occasionally, camping. Once in a while, I study (or at least dabble in) a foreign language. Every few years, I train for a few months in various martial arts (very poorly, which is why I don't do it very often). Even more rarely, I go shooting (which is expensive, which is why I don't do that very often). Perhaps the leisure activity I do least often, though, is update this website.