Education and Employment

Education

Employment

  • Kitware, Inc.

    • Founder and manager of Kitware’s office in North Carolina and leader of many of their medical imaging research efforts. For over eleven years, Kitware has successfully employed a unique open-source business model. It operates as follows. Approximately 90% of the code we develop is open-source. That code is typically developed through government grants, such as SBIRs. Open source systems create strong community support and thereby thrive by involving users and developers from around the world who use, debug, and extend the software. The web servers for our open-source projects receive over 12 million visitors every quarter. Our open-source software is used in clinical systems, in airports, at publishing companies, in the oil industry, at NVidia, for the development of World of Warcraft, and even to build and test the Linux KDE environment. The remaining 10% of our code is developed under consulting agreements with corporations. We have corporate customers from around the world, including one in the top Fortune 5 and several in the top Fortune 100. They hire us to customize and extend our open-source software to fit their needs. Some such customizations result in commercial products sold by those companies. Additionally, we are hired to teach courses, and we publish books. This business model has allowed Kitware to grow from two people in 1998 to over 100 people, with offices in New York, North Carolina, New Mexico, and France. Approximately 50% of these employees have Ph.D.’s in computer vision, graphics, visualization, image processing, or simulation-related disciplines, and several are recognized as world leaders in their fields. Another 20% of the employees hold Master’s degrees, creating a highly skilled technical work force. The company is wholly owned by its management team. The company has been profitable every year and has averaged over 30% growth per year for the past five years.

    • 2017 - Present: Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives

    • 2012 - 2017: Senior Director of Operations - North Carolina

    • 2008 - 2012 : Director of Medical Imaging Research

    • 2005 - 2008 : Chief Medical Scientist

  • The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

    • Founder and manager of the Computer-Aided Diagnosis and Display Laboratory (CADDLab) in the Department of Radiology. The CADDLab maintained approximately nine full-time faculty and staff, and collaborated with clinicians and researchers in radiology, surgery, ophthalmology, computer science, pediatrics, and anatomy. We were one of the original developers of the Insight Toolkit (ITK, http://www.itk.org), the Image-Guided Surgical Toolkit (IGTSK, http://www.igstk.org), and Midas (http://www.midasplatform.org). Our research and applications spanned all aspects of medicine, e.g., disease detection, diagnosis, and outcome assessment. We were particularly focused on modeling, registering, and displaying vessels in medical images (e.g., MRI, CT, ultrasound, confocal microscopy, retinal images), and we were awarded numerous grants and patents in that domain.

    • 2005 - Present : Adjunct Associated Professor of Computer Science

    • 2003 - 2005 : Associate Professor with Tenure, Radiology

    • 2003 - 2005 : Adjunct Associate Professor, Computer Science and Surgery

    • 1997 - 2003 : Assistant Professor of Radiology and Computer Science

    • 1993 - 1997 : Graduate Research Assistant, Computer Science

  • Surgical Navigation Technologies, Medtronic, Inc.

    • Supported the development of neurosurgical planning product and service that used vessel extraction and registration methods licensed from UNC.

    • 2001 - 2003 : Consultant

  • R2 Technologies Inc.

    • Performed applied research and assisted in the integration of methods into their computer-aided diagnosis products.

    • 1999 - 2002 : Consultant

  • McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company

    • Performed basic and applied research in neural networks and investigated the use of genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic, and expert systems. Focused, in particular, on the modeling of complex systems for real-time diagnostics. Developed the lab's primary software for neural network exploration. Played a significant role in several internal and government proposals.

    • 1989 - 1992 : Neural Networks Laboratory and McDonnell Douglas Research Laboratories, Senior Engineer and Technical Lead

Visiting Scholar

  • 2002 : Visiting Professor, MeVis Group, Bremen, Germany

  • 1998 : Visiting Scholar, ETH Zurich, Switzerland