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This is a brief overview of my experience, education and interests over the last ten years.
General Information
| Full Name | Michael Shires |
| Date of Birth | November 8th, 1996 |
Education
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2021-2025 B.S. in Software Engineering
Pennsylvania State University - World Campus - Fundamentals of engineering.
- Software architecture and design processes.
- Engineering ethics and economics.
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2017 Qualification as Engineering Laboratory Technician (ELT)
Naval Nuclear Training Program - Nuclear Field "A" School (3 months).
- Enlisted Nuclear Power School (6 months).
- Nuclear Prototype Training Unit (6 months).
- ELT School (6 months).
Experience
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2023 - Present Sea-Returnee Off-Crew (SROC) Instructor, Coordinator
SROC, Naval Nuclear Prototype Training Unit (NPTU) Charleston - Train all incoming staff members to the NPTU in the fundamentals of chemistry and radiological controls.
- Coordinate the SROC Training Program administratively.
- Over 80 Instructors qualified at or before Naval Reactors date.
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2021-2023 Crew Leading ELT
Moored Training Ship (MTS) 711, Crew "D", NPTU Charleston - Lead a division of 6-9 ELT Staff Instructors in maintaining chemistry control and radiological requirements.
- Oversee the training and graduation of ~24 ELT’s and ~300 other prospective operators per year.
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2020-2021 Leading ELT
USS Indiana (SSN 789) - Led a division of 4-7 technicians.
- Directly responsible for ensuring safe operations of reactor plant chemistry control.
- Manager for Fast Attack Submarine radiological controls casualty response program.
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2017-2020 ELT
USS Indiana (SSN 789) - Working-level technician performing chemical and radio-chemical analysis.
- Interpret and brief results to supervisors.
- Operate a submarine reactor plant safely and effectively.
Open Source Projects
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2015-2017 pathFinder
- Recursive implementation of Djisktra's Algorithm for shortest path.
- Drive a robot powered by an RPi to follow magnetic strips in industrial settings.
- Signal filtering and resolving for real-world reliability.
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2023 chemSolver
- Final project for Microprocessors course.
- chemical reaction parser and balancer in MIPS32 assembly.
- Generated linear algebra and matrix math library for solving.
Honors and Awards
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2018-2021 - Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal x3 (2020, 2021, 2021)
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2022-2023 - USS Indiana (SSN 789) Scholarship x2 (2022, 2023)
Academic Interests
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Reliable and Dependable Computing
- As digital technology advances, critical infrastructure in certain applications (flight, medical, reactor safety) advance at glacial paces due to the expensive but necessary cost of testing.
- My academic goals are to use my operational knowledge of reactor plants, and organizational structures to drive this technology in a direction that regulatory organizations would approve of.
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Computer Architecture and Optimization
- As Herb Sutter said in 2005, "The Free Lunch Is Over" (Sutter, 2005). Transistors get smaller and the direction of computer architecture has to shift.
- Modern research is focusing more and more on concurrency, optimization, and hardware data transit speeds.
- Certain programming languages have gained immense popularity due to their ease of writing code, but relative inefficient execution. If we want to continue seeing exponential gains in computing ability, the ability for a programmer to write easy, clean code that is also optimized will be a priority.
Other Interests
- Hobbies: I am an avid fan of "The Lord of The Rings" and anything Tolkien related!
- When I have time I also love to cook, bake, and consider myself an amateur cinephile - mostly my wife and I just watch movies together.