The Untold Story of... Jim Teresco, Ph.D.

1. I live in Amsterdam with my wife, daughter, and our dog, the same city where I grew up and went to school. I'm very thankful that teaching at Siena has given me the chance to return to my hometown, and so my daughter can grow up with her extended family. And if you're ever out that way, Amsterdam has some great pizza places, some of which have been around as long as I can remember, plus some good recent additions.
2. I met my future wife when we were both in college over at Union, but we didn't know each other that well. We reconnected about 10 years later through a mutual friend, and here we are.
3. I've always enjoyed traveling. I definitely caught the bug from some great family road trips growing up, and have taken many of my own trips since. I've been by car to 49 states. Yes, that includes Alaska by car in 2001, but I had to fly to Hawaii, which became my 50th state in 2006. As I was running out of states, I discovered a website where I can track which counties I've visited. That's a lot harder since there are over 3100 of them. So far, I've been to 1882 counties, for almost 60%.
4. I learned to ski when I was very young, didn't do it too much through high school, then got hooked again in college and beyond. I was living in Pittsfield for a year, right at Bousquet Mountain, when I inquired about becoming a ski instructor. I've been doing that ever since, including the last 15 seasons at Royal Mountain in Caroga Lake (come on up!). I earned my Level 1 Alpine Certification a couple seasons ago. It's not only a lot of fun to teach people this lifetime sport that I enjoy so much, it's made me a much better skier and now you can find me between lessons out on the steeps, in the woods, and searching for untracked powder. It's great that my daughter is so into skiing too - she's also an instructor at Royal and a member of the Broadalbin-Perth/Amsterdam High School alpine ski racing team. By the way, I track my ski areas too: 70 ski areas so far.
5. One of the great things about my academic field of computer science is that it's still so new. A lot of the foundational work was done not that long ago. I've gotten to see some of the giants of the field speak and met quite a few. A big highlight was sitting next to Donald Knuth and getting to chat with him and his wife at a dinner shortly after I got my first faculty job.
6. Speaking of faculty jobs, I've worked at six colleges in various roles from adjunct instructor to department chair. It didn't always go as planned but I wouldn't trade any of the experiences, working with so many great students and colleagues. Now, I'm very happy to have found the best place for me, as I start my 11th year at Siena. This career also fits nicely with my travel interests, as conference presentations have enabled me to travel to some places I never would have otherwise, and flexible summer schedules (my wife teaches middle school) let us take a bigger family trip pretty much every summer.
7. Of course I pull for all of Siena's athletic teams (Go Saints!), but a big chunk of my college sports loyalty remains with the Union College men's hockey team. I was in the pep band as a student, and I've been a season-ticket holder ever since. Even while getting my Ph.D. from their rival RPI, my loyalties never changed. Union's 2014 national championship was extra special for me, having followed the program for so long and through a lot of tough seasons.
8. My favorite pro sport is definitely baseball (Go Yankees!). I've seen MLB games in all 30 home stadiums plus 12 former ones like the old Yankee Stadium and Olympic Stadium in Montreal. Minor league games are also a lot of fun, and I am up to 65 current and former minor league parks. This list goes back to the days of the Albany-Colonie Yankees, and my additions for this summer were Harrisburg and Pensacola. Along the way, I've collected baseball caps and souvenir plastic cups from dozens of these major and minor league games.
9. I have always enjoyed keeping track of my travels. Part of that is documenting my travels with pictures. Every year for many years (right up to 2024), I have purchased a new Rand McNally Road Atlas and highlighted the places I've traveled in that year. It's fun to be able to look back. Like the county-counting, it didn't take me long to start participating when I discovered the "Clinched Highway Mapping" project that let me track all the major roads I've traveled. That project went dormant, but that prompted me to lead a team of people across the U.S. and Europe to develop a bigger and better replacement we call "Travel Mapping". FYI, I've traveled on over 102,000 miles of the roads included in the Travel Mapping system.
10. Kind of bringing it all together, back in 2010 I had this idea to build a map viewer for that highway data to create a more interesting lab exercise for my Data Structures students. It went well, so I kept working on it as time permitted. Over the years, this has turned into the METAL project, with map-based highway data from Travel Mapping and interactive algorithm visualizations, used by many of my students as well as students at other schools. It's been the subject of numerous papers and presentations, thanks in large part to over a dozen Siena students who have contributed to it through CURCA Summer Scholars projects.

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