Education and Employment

I. Education

I.a. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• • • Ph.D. Computer Science: Medical Image Analysis

    • Dissertation: "Continuous Gaussian Mixture Modeling via Cores"

    • Advisors: Stephen M. Pizer, James S. Coggins

I.b. Georgia Institute of Technology

• • • M.S. Computer Science:  Artificial Intelligence

I.c. Purdue University

• • • B.S., Computer Science 

II. Employment

II.a. Kitware, Inc.

• Bringing together expertise from Kitware’s computer vision, medical computing, data analytics, high-performance computing, and scientific visualization teams to anticipate and pursue technology trends that form synergistic opportunities for open-source software and business development.

• Successfully anticipated trends in point-of-care medical imaging, medical imaging AI, scientific visualization as web applications, and web-based AR/VR/Holographic devices and applications.  Resulted in effective positioning of vtk, vtk.js, Glance, itkWidgets, and VolView as open-source platforms to support emerging research and product development in those areas.

• Personally managed over $39M in government grants and commercial projects. My role focused on delivering innovation, clinical impact, algorithms research, and high-quality software development.

• Principal investigator and lead author on over $23M in grants from the NIH, DoD, DARPA, and EU.  Have taught courses on proposal writing at MICCAI, for industry partners, and throughout Kitware.  Currently focusing on mentoring new proposal writers at Kitware.

• (Co-)Managed the medical team for 7 years. Previously Chief Medical Scientist and Director of Medical Research.  Focused on the research component of that team: including hiring researchers, defining research directions, securing and managing funding, collaborating with clinicians and algorithm experts, and advancing our open-source toolkits to support emerging research.

• Founded Kitware’s office in North Carolina. Grew the office to 48 full-time employees while also serving as director of operations for that office.

• Titles

  • 2020 – Present: Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives

  • 2012 – 2020: Senior Director of Operations - North Carolina

  • 2008 – 2012: Director of Medical Imaging Research

  • 2005 – 2008: Chief Medical Scientist

II.b. 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.

• Titles

  • 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

II.c. Surgical Navigation Technologies, Medtronic, Inc.

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

• 2001 – 2003: Consultant

II.d. R2 Technologies Inc.

• Performed applied research and assisted in the integration of patented methods I had developed (licensed by UNC) into their computer-aided diagnosis products.

• 1999 – 2002: Consultant

II.e. 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

III. Visiting Scholar

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

• 1998 : Visiting Scholar, ETH Zurich, Switzerland