Steve received degrees in both History and Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, as well as minors in Greek and Latin, from the Pennsylvania State University in 2013. Since beginning at Columbia he has had the opportunity to study a variety of topics, from third century Athenian politics, to the education and literacy of Roman soldiers in Britain. As an ancient historian, he tries to emphasize the important role physical evidence plays in forming a comprehensive understanding of aspects of life not typically addressed in the literary sources. He hopes to combine archaeology, epigraphy, and papyrology with the extant written material to examine the social and economic landscape of Rome during the late Republic and early Empire. His current projects include tutoring private school students throughout the greater NYC area in Latin and learning XML code in order to catalogue inscriptions housed at Columbia University into a searchable database. His most recent work involves using information from sources such as papyri from the Roman camp at Dura and the wooden tablets obtained from Vindolanda in order to better understand the nature of military education, the social and economic advancement of soldiers, and the impact of the presence of the Roman military on the provinces and their populations. In addition, he hopes to further study the notion that the Roman army was economically self-sufficient, in stark contrast to a vast majority of military forces that came before and have come afterward, and the fluctuating attitudes towards athletes and gladiators in Greek and Roman societies.