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

I received my Ph.D. 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 M.S. in Biomedical Informatics from OHSU in 2004.

My research interests focus on anonymized large-scale clinical data sharing for research, in particular the processes, technologies and ethic impact of sharing such data to advance "translational" science. I focus on biomedicine, but many of the problems facing high-throughput data-heavy computing research are relevent 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.

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 academia, I spent 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 received a BS majoring 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 MacMini, Powerbook G4 and MacBook Pro. And for basic communications a Treo Blackberry iPhone (jailbroken!) and an iPod Touch. I have also worked on various "big iron" machines from the HP3000 to the MicroVax, as well as early performance machines such as Sun SPARC or SGI IRIS. I discovered Linux in 1992, but presently Apple does UNIX better. And better, and better.