Height: 6'3"
Blond hair and blue eyes (and no, I'm not Norwegian).
I just finished my PhD in Genetics at the University of Iowa after
earning my BS (93) and MS (95) in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Scheetz, from the German surname Schieß, whose definition is "steil emporstrebende Fläche". The literal translation of which is "steep upwards-striving surface", make of that what you will.
The other possible original source for Scheetz is SchießER or Schießl, which both mean (auf Deutsch) "der gern schießt". Meaning someone who glady or joyfully shoots.
Todd has two separate derivations, one French and one German. The French version of Todd is Tod and means fox (you may have noticed the fox in the movie "The Fox and the Hound" was named Tod). The German version of Todd is also spelled Tod but it doesn't have as congenial of a meaning as does the French. In German, Tod means "dead" or "death".
Note on German spellings. If you want to know how to incorporate the German characters (or others) into your documents check out this page.
I attended several elementary and junior high schools (all in the Iowa City area, or close by), and graduated from West High School in 1989.
From there, I ended up going to the University of Iowa where I almost double-majored in Comp. Sci and Electrical Engineering. Thankfully, I was talked out of doing a double-major, and received my BS in Electrical Engineering in May of 1993. I was lucky enough to stumble into a great research group headed up by Profs. Tom Casavant and Mark Andersland, the Trace-Recovery Research Group.
After earning my Masters degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, I switched over to Computer Science for my PhD. After a year, I came to the realization that I was in danger of "pigeon-holing" myself into a very narrow area of research that I was currently working (fine-grained monitoring of parallel and distributed systems, and how to correct for the consequences of such monitoring - i.e., how to correct for the probe effect where monitoring a system changes its behavior). And even more startling, that I no longer enjoyed the research as I once did. When I told Tom about this, he was somewhat disappointed but mentioned the possibility of switching my focus to bioinformatics and am really enjoying my research again. I officially joined the Genetics PhD program in the Fall Semester of 1997 and have now graduated!! Woo-hoo! My thesis research was titled: "Development of genomic resources for the rat: an EST map and analysis of alternative polyadenylation."
Born to Edward Nicholas and Linda Ann Scheetz on the 12th day of January in the year 1971. Todd was an inquisitive lad, always asking questions. Unfortunately, he had an irritating habit (also known as a knack) of taking things apart, but at that age he didn't have a good track record for putting them back together (correctly).
Todd was soon followed by Mari Elizabeth,
his sister, born on the 19th of
August in 1972. And later by Megan Victoria
born on the 1st of August 1981.