I’m Michael Shires.

I’m currently a graduate student at the University of Virginia pursuing a dual master’s MS in Computer Engineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and an MBA at the Darden School of Business.

Before starting my graduate school journey, I spent ten years enlisted in the nuclear submarine community. I started as a lab technician, performing reactor coolant analyses and radiological surveys on the USS Indiana (SSN 789), eventually managing the laboratory division before transferring.

While aboard the Indiana, we took her out of the shipyards for the first time, going on sea trials and later commissioning in 2018, making me a Plankowner. we finally took her on the maiden deployment in 2020, where I was visited by the hardy King of the North and was marked with a Blue Nose.

Afterwards, I was stationed in Charleston, South Carolina as an instructor at Nuclear Power Training Unit, Charleston(NPTU-C) to teach prospective nuclear operators. While at NPTU-C I managed a team of 5-7 amazing instructors and qualified over 50 future lab technicians (my pride and joy), and hundreds of other general operators.

During my last two years at NPTU-C I worked in the staff training department as a Training Coordinator, administering an 8-week program that all prospective staff members coming to Charleston attended. During this time we reinforced quality teaching techniques, dived deep into fundamentals, and instilled in our instructors the standard of excellence expected out of them during their tour of duty.

After my time in the Navy, I spent six months as a venture associate at Context Ventures. During my time with them, I helped portfolio companies excel, performed due diligence on prospective investments, and helped build some exciting internal projects. I am eterenally grateful to the teams at Atomic Insights and Dunedain Systems for letting me join their teams, and can’t wait to see what the future has in store for them.

I graduated cum laude from Penn State University with a bachelors in Software Engineering. My capstone project was porting the Ironclad kernel, a real-time. formally verified kernel written in Ada to the RISC-V architecture, under the mentorship of Olivier Henley, who spent countless hours showing our team what right looked like, and instilling in us a desire to know why systems work how they do, not just how they work.