Bio
I have ten years experience in the academic, private sector, non-profit, and Federal Government communities, with wide-ranging interests in emerging and open source technology, information retrieval & extraction, natural language processing, Internet news media analysis, geospatial, biosurveillance, and crisis early warning. At various points in my career, I have served as a consultant to organizations including the Georgetown University Medical Center, US Department of Defense (DOD), Orange County, Florida, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment, and the US Intelligence Community. I graduated with a B.S. in biology from the University of Richmond.
More recently…
For two years (during 2007-2008), I was the lead systems integrator on a large-scale biosurveillance program called Global Argus at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC. Global Argus analyzes Internet media in over 40 languages to identify and track thousands of socially disruptive events around the world, many due to disease. During my time, we developed an Internet media sourcing strategy, analyzed millions of web pages, and tracked tens of thousands of socially disruptive events. Global Argus has been described in the New Yorker and Newsweek magazines as “radically innovative” and a “game-changing breakthrough” in analysis. The team at Georgetown continues to do great work.
Additionally, I helped develop and administer an Internet media analysis portal for over 700 state and local government users during the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado. It was a blast!
Inspired by my work in biosurveillance, growing interest in emerging technology, and desire to do good, I co-founded a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization called The Global Resource Initiative (TGRI), where I was the chief technology officer (CTO). At TGRI, we focused our efforts on building a local “One Health” capability in the developing world. One Health provides a holistic perspective on the societal impact of human, animal, and environmental health. Specifically, we worked on building capacity in the agricultural sector of East Africa by providing access to expertise and innovative technology, like mobile-to-web and localized knowledge-sharing systems. We established partnerships in Kenya and Tanzania, and I worked to build networks of technology experts in Africa and abroad. Our goal was to provide services in areas of greatest need in under-developed regions of the world, like information technology for One Health, and in return improve awareness of emerging crises with potentially regional or global impact, like disease.
I have sinced moved on but my interests in emerging crisis, emerging geographies, and technology have not faded. At my blog and on Twitter, I will look to share my experiences and I talk about topics that interest me – please feel free to engage!
