Ben received a BS in Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, then moved to Utah for grad school as part of the mathematical biology group at the U of U. After two years, Ben decided that the PhD track wasn’t the right fit and left with an MS in Applied Mathematics, but remained in Utah because of the access to the outdoors. Ben worked at Backcountry.com as a software engineer for 8 1/2 years, eventually leaving for Qualtrics where he was the founding member of the text analytics team and went on to manage product engineering teams over text analytics, data processing, and exports functionality.

Ben's free time is generally spent on one time-consuming outdoor activity or another. For a long time it was climbing or backcountry skiing (depending on the season), but more recently it’s become narrowly/obsessively focused skimo (ski mountaineering) racing, which means Ben spends a lot of time backcountry skiing in the winter, running up and down hills in the summer, and “resting” by entertaining two small kids.