Roman first worked in web development in the mid-ninties while still a teenager. Eventually,he left New York City's silicon alley and returned to school, recieving a BS in computer science from Stanford University in 2000. After a stint in the US Army, Roman attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop and received an MFA in creative writing in 2007.
His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Des Moines Register, Stanford Magazine and elsewhere. He enjoys building websites and writing. In his spare time, he studies Austrian economics, and grapples with the Hawkeye Brazilian Jiu Jitsu club.
Don recieved a BFA with Honors in 2002 from the University of Iowa where he studied painting, intaglio print making and graphic design. During his studies he also held several small shows of his work in Iowa City, Istanbul Turkey, London England and Kyoto Japan. Though he has yet to travel to most of those palces.
In 2006 he finished a Masters in Library and Information Science also from the U. of I., specializing in information retrieval. At which time he learned to program and build web based search systems using Java, PHP, xhtml and css. Subsequently working on web and application development of image and video retrieval systems using Java, Python, JavaScript and other web languages.
Currently he is finishing a Ph.D. in Human Computer Interaction specializing in web design and development with an eye toward online information retrieval systems. And he has worked on several projects in other areas like computer security and medical health records as an interaction and graphic designer. He has also written several small CMS's in PHP and Python.