Thirteen years ago, I relocated from Massachusetts to Erie after a lifestyle change. The shift in work-life balance was immediate and refreshing—I often joke that moving here made me ten years younger! It was also the start of a wonderful new chapter when a mutual friend introduced me to my wife, Ellen (some of you may know her as Nancy). Together, Ellen and I share a love of travel, live music, theater, and exploring the beautiful Colorado outdoors. Family is important; from my previous marriage, I am the proud father of a daughter, and our family has since grown to include six grandchildren and a recent arrival—our very first great-grandchild!

Career

I’m retired from a career in technology, where I regularly transitioned between individual contributor roles and managing teams of up to 65 engineers, balancing substantial budgets, and managing complex project deliveries. My diverse background includes general image processing, advanced medical imaging, network security, database management, and user interface design. A couple of my favorite projects:

Medical Imaging

When I was on the research faculty of the Georgetown Medical School in the Imaging Physics department, I had the opportunity to work with some high-end graphics computers. Did you know that Pixar started out as a hardware company? They had a very powerful graphics computer, and needed a way to sell it – I was using it during the early days of three-dimensional imaging in medicine (think CT and MR scans). To help, Pixar came up with an animation package called “Renderman” as doing animation is very resource intensive. The rest is history! Pixar is still using Renderman today – see https://renderman.pixar.com/. A bit of trivia – do you know why Pixar has Luxo Junior as one of their iconic images? It was the first computer-generated object to cast it’s shadow on itself!

AI-Driven Customer Service

Another engaging project involved developing an AI program designed for customer service call centers. The software listens to calls in real time and instantly provides customer service agents with the documentation they need, allowing the agent to focus their attention on customer needs. Even better, it monitors stress levels, automatically looping in a supervisor if a caller or an agent become agitated.

Education

University of Pennsylvania

Bachelor of Arts

Chemistry and Psychology (Double Major)

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Drexel University and

Virginia Polytechnic Institute

Master of Science

Information Science

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George Washington University

Doctor of Science

Computer Science

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