I am an Acting Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics within the School of Medicine, University of Washington. I am also Deputy Director of the NCRR-funded Institute of Translational Health Sciences Biomedical Informatics core.

I received my PhD in Biomedical and Health Informatics from the Department of Medical Education & Biomedical Informatics at the University of Washington. My studies were funded by a fellowship from the National Library of Medicine. I received my MS in Biomedical Informatics from OHSU in 2004.

I am interested in issues associated with data-rich research computing software design, development and implementation. I focus on biomedical areas, but many of the problems facing high-throughput data-heavy computing research are also concerns to other areas of science. I am particularly interested in how researchers can use collaborative computing approaches to share and leverage human and computational resources. Please see my Research page for more information.

My secondary interests are in bringing mobile device delivery of health information systems to the "average" consumer - elegant software should not only be available to the users of the iPhone - not that I don't want one... There should be broad and easy availability of vetted and validated personal health management software for chronic medical issues such as diabetes, cancer care or hypertension.

I am originally from Auckland, New Zealand, but have been in the U.S., and largely in the Pacific Northwest since 1979. I have lived in New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, South Africa and England, but most of my adult life has been in the USA. I became a U.S. Citizen in 2002.

Prior to returning to grad school, I spent about 9 years in the consumer health informatics software industry, where I did a great deal of PDA development. Here is a pic of me during the Newton days (circa '96) - I'm pretty much a software geek. During this time I wrote several commercial health care applications, as well as a handful of fun toys for the Palm platform. This period was the impetus to pursue research to better understand how to design and build software that can best support information management in biomedicine and health.

Before all of this I was at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, where I picked up a BS in computer science.

I started my computer experience in 1980 on a TRS-80 Model I, Level II. This was followed by a Timex Sinclair ZX81, a Franklin Ace 1000, a IBM XT, Mac, Mac+ etc etc and now Powerbook G4 and MacMini! Oh, and a Treo Blackberry. I have also worked on various "big iron" machines from the HP3000, MicroVax, Sun SPARC or SGI IRIS. I discovered linux in 1992, but presently Apple does UNIX better...

Here is a couple of pics of my sweetie and I in Staffordshire, England and also just below Mt Blanc in Chamonix.