About me
A personal and professional history
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beginnings
A love of chemistry
Like Oliver Sacks, my first love was chemistry. As a child I hung out at the Lawrence Hall of Science, collected serpentine crystals in the California hills, and hunted for fossils and geodes in Nevada.
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education
Yale University and The University of Texas at Austin
At Yale I studied everything I could: art history, literature, classics, philosophy, neurophysiology... Several courses by Heinrich von Staden were influential. I read Ovid and Galen and learned about the interplay between philosophy, technology, and medicine.
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Teaching
Member of faculty, Univ. of Texas at Austin
For six years I taught part-time in the Science, Technology, and Society program. The courses explored the origins of counting, writing, and computing, and introduced the principles of human-computer interaction. Students reinvented Durer's Renaissance-era perspective machine and built Turing machines made of toilet paper, a die, and post-it notes.
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Today
Product management and product design
For over fifteen years I've been product managing and designing software for companies large and small. At The Economist I was introduced to scrum and agile by Rob Purdie and Emannuel Szabados, and have been an advocate of these techniques ever since.
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New
Adventures