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I was born in Pontiac, Michigan on May 4th, 1979.  If you’re wondering, Kit is an old English nickname for Christopher, though I certainly cannot tell you how they came up with it.  It dates back at least to Shakespeare’s time.  In any case, my parents knew of Kit Carson, (whose given name was Christopher) and similarly gave me Christopher as a “more professional” name to fall back on should I find that Kit was insufficient.  To this day, I haven’t.  Further, I usually find Christopher to be a bit cumbersome and only use it for “official” documents.  I did most of my growing up in the Clarkston and Waterford areas of northern Oakland County.  After graduating as salutatorian of my high school class (of nearly 400), I went to Michigan Tech University, where I got my Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering, with a emphasis in Computer Engineering and an Engineering Enterprise concentration.

My wife and I headed to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, where I spent four years working for Unisys as a Hardware Engineer, working as an ASIC designer.  In reality, I spent most of my days writing software in various languages to support the ASIC design process, though I was never totally immune to the responsibility to fire up a waveform viewer and debug hardware.  I was an inventor or co-inventor on three different patented applications during that time.  I don’t know what I think about these software patents, but it’s certainly neat to have them.

I worked on the side to acquire my Master’s Degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities campus.  My graduate studies focused primarily on User Interface Design and Processor Architecture.

Shortly after I completed this degree, I accepted a job teaching undergraduate Computer Engineering courses at my alma mater, Michigan Tech.  I’ve been here ever since. For the last three years, I’ve also been pursing a Ph.D. in Applied Cognitive Science and Human Factors. I’ve been focusing on memory and learning, specifically about metacognition of memory. The ultimate goal is always to bring insights from this work back into the engineering classroom.

On August 19th, 2000, I married Julie Lloyd, a remarkably good decision on both of our parts.  Since then, we have been blessed with three beautiful children.  Cameron was born in Minnesota in 2005, Olivia was born in Houghton in 2007 and Heidi was born late in 2008.

When I’m not working, I’m usually on a bike. It doesn’t matter too much what kind — road, gravel, mountain. I do like to keep my tires on the ground and prefer to earn my downhills. I also commute year-round by bike, even in a place that gets over 200” of snow every winter. I serve as the advisor for the Copper Country Cycling Club and am a USA Cycling official.

I’m an ambassador for Grammarly, both for the real-time grammar and tone information you can get, but also for their generative AI product, GrammarlyGO.

Finally, but above all, I am a born-again believer in Jesus Christ, the only son of God.  All I do is through Him and to His glory.