who exactly am I?
Simply put - I'm a nerd by nature. By profession, I am an engineer and partner at SGE Consulting Structural Engineers, a firm that my father started and which we currently run. By experience, I am an avid technology enthusiast, interested in the latest and greatest that technology has to offer.
I was born in Moscow, Russia, and immigrated to the United States with my family when I was 5 years old.
my interests
I hold three Civil Engineering degrees from the University of California, Berkeley: a BS in Civil Engineering with an emphasis in Structural Engineering, MS in Engineering & Project Management, and a PhD in Engineering & Project Management with minors in Structural Engineering and Public Policy.
I have the privilege of working in a small firm where my days are a mixture of structural design, drafting, business development, marketing, accounting, and everything else it takes to run a corporation. For more information about our firm, visit the SGE Consulting Structural Engineers website (which I also happened to design).
The long talks that my family had about philosophy, history, politics, and policy instilled in me an active interest in these areas. These days, this interest is manifested in the multitudes of political sites, people, and sources that I enthusiastically subscribe to in my RSS Reader just to keep up.
During my doctoral research, I was fortunate enough to study at the Goldman School of Public Policy, where I looked into how policy decisions are made in light of engineering data. This fusion of engineering and public policy is an exciting field, and one that combines two of my main interests.
It is safe to say that I have an absolute obsession with technology. As a kid I built, fixed, tinkered, broke, and rebuilt computers. For over 10 years, I have run a small side business providing tech consulting, web hosting, and web design to a variety of people and firms.
These days you'll rarely find me without some type of Apple product with me. I switched to the Mac in 2004, and have since proudly converted countless others. Unfortunately, software for my work is mostly Windows only (that's changing), so I'm still somewhat up to date about what's going on in the Windows world.
What started as early graphic design for the small tech forum I ran as a kid turned into me doing web, graphic, and icon design in one form or another for the last 15 years. I have worked on a variety of projects (web design, custom graphics, icon design, app store iconography, etc) in a many different industries.
While I don't get to spend as much time designing as I'd like to (or as I used to), I do take on the occasional project and greatly enjoy the experience of creating clean, organized, and sleek designs for my clients.
For an idea of my past work, please visit any other following websites: LA Gauge, SGE, and Banchik Dental.