Working with communities accross the country to build the next generation of Internet throught the realization of Smart City technology backed by Gigabit networks and applications.

As the first permanent staff with Academic Preservation Trust, it was a fun challenge to establish all of the infrastructure and business practices the organization would use. I created the staffing plan, hired and managed most of the other permanent staff, as well as liaisoned with or managed contributors from partner universities who contributed to the project. Additionally, I had the opportunity to create large portions of the original codebase, release some open source libraries that contributed to the field and designed several APIs that were fundamental to the success of our project and a sister project known as The Digital Preservation Network.

I moved from the Health Sciences Center to this job because I really liked the challenge of migrating the legacy search system to a modernized solr index with faceting and other features that would greatly enhance the research experience for all University users. Not only did I need to install and manage the central search application in a beta state, but I had to engineer all the methods for migrating and displaying the legacy records from our catalog in the search tool, which was based in Apache Solr. A big win in this job was translating our searchable records from a legacy Marc8 format to Unicode, which enabled searching of a large number of previously inaccessible academic resources that used their native languages like Mandarin or Arabic. (The Tamil Language set was particularly interesting, language nerds we should talk sometime.)

Making the transfer from microbiologist to full-time IT professional, I was positioned to use my skills to focus developing resources for researchers and academics.

As an intelligence analyst, my earliest real professional education included a large amount of report writing, relational database work and presentation preparation. It's amazing to me how useful these early experiences were to me throughout the rest of my professional life, particularly in summarizing and presenting findings, as well as the inherent work ethic you find in military service.