I have a background ranging from international finance and administration, programming, software translation and localization management. I’ve been a medical doctor, business owner and professor. As I look back, the common thread in all of these has been innovation. In each of my jobs, I was able to innovate the role, often introducing new technologies, frameworks and processes to stream-line current practices and address new challenges.
All of the posts of my experiences can be found here.
I was senior consolidations accountant at the San Rafael headquarters of Autodesk, before moving to their European headquarters in Switzerland where I was senior financial analyst for the operations and software centers, and subsequently world-wide manager of vendors and translation services. You can read more here
My first programming job was using Clipper, an MS-DOS version of dBase, to write a scheduling module for a private education company. I switched to Linux three decades ago, and wrote my first “web app” in Perl/CGI using PostgreSQL, back when JavaScript was just getting started. I am now very proficient in Python and R, with intermediate skills in Haskell and JavaScript, as well as attendant technologies such as HTML and CSS.
The best way to get an idea of my programming and data science skills are to look at some of the projects on the site. You can also find more here
I practiced for over 15 years as a Doctor of Oriental Medicine, much of the time teaching at Southwest Acupuncture College. I was most known for teaching the Chinese materia medica, a three-semester sequence covering well over a 1,000 individual medicinal substances. I re-arranged herbs from their traditional order to one more didactically-oriented, providing structure for the students, and developed rich slide presentations with \(LaTeX\). Other areas I taught included diagnosis and differentiation as well as basic Chinese medical theory.
I ran an independent clinic, where I combined TCM style acupuncture, Kiiko style acupuncture, and Daoist style of Jeffrey Yuen. A large part of my practice, as is typical in American acupuncture clinics, involved acute and chronic pain syndromes, but a significant part was also devoted to digestive, emotional, gynecological and sleep disorders. Treatments generally involved a combination of acupuncture, herbal therapy and food therapy.
I’m interested in history, languages and linguistics, gardening, cooking and hiking. Look for articles on some of these topics in the near future.