Background

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 (voting counts!)

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 advance information management in biomedicine and health.

Before all of this I was at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, where I received 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 MacMini, MacBook Pro, Air and iPad. I have succumbed to the iphone fever (mostly), and live in fear of breaking ios6. I have also worked on various "big iron" machines from the HP3000 and MicroVax, as well as early performance machines such as Sun SPARC or SGI IRIS. I discovered Linux in 1992, and remain nostalgic about glorious shell programming

Extracurricular

I greatly enjoy building things, so in addition to working on my 117 year old farmhouse, I rebuild vintage cars, brew beer and make foodstuffs. I also spend as much time as possible in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, both backcountry snowboarding and modest mountaineering. Here is my 1965 Triumph Spitfire, which I have built from the bolts up. Even hand painted it (DON'T TRY THIS).