What did you do prior to attending (what is now known as) SBMI?
I was a software engineer, primarily working on projects in financial services and payment processing.
What drew you to health informatics? How did you initially get into the field?
The chance to do some really meaningful work. I still see that opportunity, and think that advancing information solutions remains one of the most compelling strategies for improving healthcare.
How has the field changed since you graduated?
When I started the program, we were at the end of traditional thinking in information processing. In the time since, multicore processors became standard, cloud infrastructure became a cheap way to try new ideas out on highly scalable computing resources and the landscape of data processing and analysis has shifted to a scale we couldn't have dreamed of at that time, even with open source tools. Healthcare now struggles with integrating these advances into its complex domain, and that creates a lot of exciting opportunities for people with creative ideas.
What did you do after graduating, and where are you now?
Immediately after graduating I took a job with an inventions company based in Washington, D.C. called Ideal Innovations. I worked on machine vision applications in biometrics to solve identity problems and focused on field applications where those problems were causing severe problems such as Iraq. After a few years of that I hung out my own shingle and began consulting for organizations to help them create more value with owned data sources. Today I am the Managing Principal at Blacklight Solutions and I steer the company's vision and strategy so our team can do great things with data for the organizations we serve.