I was born in Columbus, Ohio, but my parents moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin when I was about 2 years old. Hence, I am forever a cheesehead!!! My family still lives in Wisconsin. Thanks to my brother and sister (and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, of course), I have 6 beautiful and wonderful nieces and nephews. Being here on the east coast, I miss them very much and I can’t wait to go home and see them again.

I went to high school at Brookfield East High School and college at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, obtaining a degree in Medical Science in 1993. I fell in love with Madison. It has a charm which is unique in the Midwest. Everyone who knows me has probably gotten sick of me raving about Wisconsin and Madison, in particular. What can I say? When you’ve been to paradise, it’s hard to stop talking about it… After graduating, I enrolled at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, where I received my MD in May of 1996.

I did my internal medicine residency at the New England Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts and became a full-fledged doc on June 30th, 1999. The more time that I’ve spent away from NEMC, the more I’ve learned to appreciate the lessons and training that I acquired there. At the time, however, it seemed like hell. Luckily, I had a bunch of friends going through the same process and they made hell seem manageable.

After residency, I worked as a locum tenens physician for about 6 months in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Minnesota. I was drawn away from clinical medicine by the dot-com gold rush, but I left without any gold. I worked for a company called medicalrecords.com. Our goal was to provide a secure place for the storage of health records, while also giving users personalized information, tools and programs to improve their health. It was a very exciting project and I’m sure it will live again, once someone figures out a way to make money from it.

The big upside of my time away from medicine was that I got to reacquaint myself with my love of programming. I’ve donated a lot time to the OpenACS project (among many others) and received an amazing amount of education and experience in return.

I am a proud member of the Dead Runners Society, the Free Software Foundation (#1088), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.