After a brief, three-month experiment with retirement, I joined Fly Fishers International as President and CEO in 2026. It is an unexpected but especially gratifying next chapter for me, bringing together a lifetime of fly fishing with much of what I have spent my professional career doing: leading organizations, building teams, teaching, experimenting with technology, and thinking about how institutions can evolve without losing sight of what makes them valuable in the first place.
Before FFI, my career moved through academia, technology, and entrepreneurship. I retired from Apple in June 2026 after five years working in artificial intelligence and machine learning. I joined Apple in 2021 as a Distinguished Research Scientist working on machine-learning-driven personalization and recommendations and later served as a Senior Engineering Research Manager, leading personalization science teams supporting the App Store, Apple Books, Apple Podcasts, and Apple TV.
Before joining Apple, I spent twenty-five years in higher education as a professor, researcher, and academic administrator. My last academic appointment was at Washington State University, where I served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English and Data Analytics. Earlier in my career, I held faculty and leadership positions at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Stanford University, and the University of Northern Colorado.
Along the way, I also became involved in a number of entrepreneurial ventures. I helped found three book-industry technology companies—Novel Projects, which operated as BookLamp; Archer Jockers, LLC; and Authors AI—as well as the nonprofit Western Institute of Irish Studies. I continue to serve in a limited capacity as Chief Research Officer of Authors AI, advising on the continued development of its computational methods for analyzing fiction.
My research career has focused primarily on large-scale computational text analysis and on the ways quantitative methods can reveal patterns in literary history and culture. That work is described most fully in my first book, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History.
Despite the computational turn my scholarship eventually took, my original training was in literary studies, with particular emphasis on Irish and Irish American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In some ways, much of my career has involved moving back and forth between those two worlds: close attention to individual texts and large-scale attempts to understand patterns across thousands of them.
My second book, Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature, was conceived as a practical companion to Macroanalysis. In 2020, I collaborated with my former graduate student Rosamond Thalken on a substantially revised second edition, adding new chapters and updating the code to incorporate more contemporary methods and software libraries.
My third book, The Bestseller Code, coauthored with my former graduate student Jodie Archer, brought computational literary analysis to a broader trade audience. The book describes research underlying an algorithm designed to identify novels likely to appear on The New York Times bestseller list. That work received the University of Nebraska’s Breakthrough Innovation of the Year Award in 2017.
These days, much of my attention is directed toward FFI and the question of how a nearly sixty-year-old organization can build on its history while reaching a new generation of fly fishers. I’m particularly interested in education, community, technology, conservation, and finding new ways to connect people who share an enthusiasm for fly fishing and the waters and places that sustain it. After a career that has taken some fairly unexpected turns, this one feels especially worthwhile.