About me

I didn’t know the difference between Korea, China, and Japan until I was 23 — but then I met a Korean woman, learned to say “사랑해요,” and have studied Korean language and culture for more than a decade, reaching level-four fluency on the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK) and appearing on Korean news channels such as KBS and YTN while studying the language in Los Angeles. I’m the author of Marrying Korean, a cross-cultural love story for the 21st century, and two books on the Busan dialect. I contributed a six-part series to the Los Angeles Review of Books Korea Blog on my ever-deepening experiences with my Korean family and Korean culture. Before writing about Korea, I received my PhD in Optical Sciences and worked in radiology research, publishing in top peer-reviewed academic journals such as Medical Physics and IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. I now live in the San Francisco Bay Area with my wife and three-year-old daughter.