Alexander "Xander" Will is a full-time doctoral lab lead/instructor at VCU & a sound tech for a local church. He was formerly a percussion instructor for The Consulting Arts since 2015; he will still jump in on sound tech when TCA needs it.
Xander's main musical genre is shoegaze. He started learning piano at 5, drums at 8, plays electric bass & guitar, and performs vocals.
Bands:
- Homey - 🆕 Recording: Homey
- Concert: Frontier, RVA
- Sick Semper, a Virginia indie band
- Late Night Cable (aka Broad Shoulders) - album, single
- Floorsweeper
- Dream (aka Geese Howard) - Toronto through Mississauga, In the Mouth a Desert (Pavement cover), Sound Cloud
Other musical experience:
- High School bands: Extraordinary Commission, Staring at the Ceiling, Phosgene
- performed at VCU Singleton Center for Jazz Day
- performed for jazz specialist Sherman Irby at the Lincoln Center in New York City
- workshop at Tulane University, during Jazz Fest
- interned in sound engineering @ Sound of Music (RVA)
Education
Xander is an ABD Ph.D. student in Electrical/Computer Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), working on NASA Urban Air Mobility under the mentorship of Carl Elks, Ph.D. Besides presenting in Portugal (2023) at the DSN conference and in Chicago (2022) at the AIAA transportation conference, he has authored multiple peer-reviewed papers. His Curriculum vitae (CV) is on ResearchGate.
- leads a computer engineering lab at VCU
- earned the 2021-2022 Electrical Engineering Graduate Assistant of the Year
- earned the Provost Scholarship
- interned at George Mason University in EE via the Virginia Microelectronics Consortium (VMEC)
- competed in IEEE Robotics
- earned the Provost Scholarship
He graduated from the Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School (MLWGS) in Richmond, Virginia, after receiving scholarships from the Hanover County Council and Mechanicsville Elementary School PTA in 2017. Went to Nationals with Mechanicsville Tech Dragons FRC #422 in 2016.