Origins
I was born August 30, 1979 in Lynchburg, Virginia to Michael and Deborah Stearns. In late fall of 1985 my mother, my sister Phoebe, and I moved to Cleveland Heights, Ohio. We moved into a house five houses down from my aunt Gillian Solem (my mother's sister), her husband Ed, and their children Amanda and Martin. This is where I grew up. Cleveland Heights is home to a diverse, progressive schools system that provided an excellent foundation for the education of all of the students.

This tapered off to a degree by the time we all made it to high school, but fortunately there were some excellent teachers and students at the school (though there were some that were fairly awful as well). In high school I also began swimming competitively. By the start of my junior year I was enthusiastic enough about swimming to drop out of the boy scouts (I earned the rank of star), stop taking French, and take fewer hard classes.
UNC
Even before my undergraduate career came to a close I was fairly certain that I wanted to do something that related to Math/Physics/Computer Science, but was more applied than many of the courses that I had taken. Physical Oceanography had been in the back of my mind for some number of years, and seemed like a great choice to achieve my criteria. I also had grown tired of the exceedingly cloudy Michigan winters leading me southward. When in my job search a low level technician position in Physical Oceanography showed up in Chapel Hill, I thought it sounded like a great thing to try for a year, so I did. As it turned out, it was something I enjoyed, thus I have kept it up for a little bit over 4 years to date.
College
Starting in the fall of 1997 I attended Kalamazoo College, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. "K" College is a small liberal arts school with an emphasis on a broad education, usually including at least one "quarter" (they were actually trimesters, but refferred to as quarters for historical reasons) of study abroad. I initially planned to be a Physics major, but then decided that I might rather go for a Math-Physics double major with a Chinese minor. I studied Chinese for 4 quarters, at which point I realized that my plan was not going to be possible with the planned 6 months in China (during which time I would not have been able to take any Math or Physics courses). So I stopped taking Chinese and decided to be a Math major, Physics minor. As part of that plan I spent 6 months in Budapest, Hungary studying Math, Hungarian Language, and Hungarian Arts and Culture. That experience really stands out from the rest of my college years as being a spectacular learning experience (which is by no means to imply that my time at K was not great in that regard).

Swimming, although an interesting part of my college experience, did not last long, just one year. Due to the intense schedule as well as some personality conflicts with the coach and team, I decided to stop swimming. Instead I prided myself in being active in a variety of campus organizations including the Non-Violence Student Organization, the Environmental Organization, and Habitat For Humanity. I tried to keep my education broad taking a variety of extracurricular classes: creative writing, ethics, east asian religion, cultural anthropology, and prisons and public policy. I also emphasised photography, taking several classes and doing a Senior Individualized Project in photography (focussing on the environmental impact of humans).