bio

Bio

 

             I maintain a wide range of interests and activities, as I continue to search for people and activities that make me happy, information that helps me understand the world around me, and experiences that help me grow as a person.

 

             I was born and raised in Hawaii. Some of my interests include music, martial arts, dancing, reading, and arts & crafts. In high school, I probably spent more time on these interests than studying, though I don’t consider it wasted time, because it kept me interested in learning new skills. I also more than made up the study time in college.

 

             In 2001, I matriculated at the California Institute of Technology. I really liked Caltech -- I met a lot of interesting and incredibly smart people. The curriculum was extremely humbling, but I consider it to have been a character-building experience (and it’s always good to have character). I also fenced, worked a variety of part-time jobs, and did volunteer work through the Caltech Y. Though I switched from Chemistry to Mechanical Engineering early on, I did the bulk of my undergraduate research work with Dr. Adrian Ponce, the chemist at JPL who created the “Anthrax Smoke Detector.” I primarily worked on a meso-scale self-assembly project in his group, in which my goal was to build a physical model to demonstrate the mechanism behind enzyme interactions, as a teaching tool. I did get to do some CAD modeling for Adrian’s detector, and design and machine equipment for my project. Adrian was an awesome mentor, and I ultimately decided to attend graduate school based on my experience working in his group.

 

             After receiving my B.S. degree in 2005, I decided to pursue a graduate degree in Mechanical Engineering as a UC Doctoral Scholar Fellow at UCSB. I completed a M.S. degree in Dynamical Systems in 2007. In my thesis, I analyzed a variant of an existing coupled oscillator-based group motion coordination model, which produced interesting vehicular motion, and characterized the vehicles’ trajectories in terms of the system parameters.

 

             For my dissertation, I decided to change topics and focus on how groups make decisions. I was awarded an IGERT Fellowship in 2007 in the Systems Biology group in Computational Science and Engineering. I work with my primary advisor, Jeff Moehlis from Mechanical Engineering, on developing mathematical models for group decision-making for cybernetic systems, which we verify through simulation. I was also interested in analyzing data from groups of human observers, so I searched for a collaborator. I found Miguel Eckstein and the VIU group in the Psychology department, and, eventually, a second project. More detail on my work can be found here.

 

             Outside of the office, I enjoy a variety of hobbies.

 

M. Kimura, 2011