I grew up in beautiful Maple Ridge, near Vancouver Canada.

I went to MIT, planning to study artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Instead, I delighted in the math of digital signal processing and joined the sailing team. I wrote my master’s thesis during a one year internship in Austin, TX and graduated with a BScience and MEngineering in 1996.

After a brief stint as a management consultant (wow, not a great fit), I contributed to several startups in Berkeley, CA and Pittsburgh, PA as a software engineer and jack-of-all trades.

The last startup was a biotech; the work inspired me to take a few classes at the nearby University of Pittsburgh. I was hooked. I upped the ante from a part-time certificate program to a full-time PhD, and have loved pretty much every minute of it. Ok, except the minutes leading up to submitting papers, those are stressful.

The Department of Biomedical Informatics has been extremely supportive. I was lucky enough to receive funding from the National Library of Medicine for my studies. My dissertation advisor, Dr Wendy Chapman, is wonderful: inspiring and practical.

I hope to finish my thesis research and writing in the next few months, and defend in early 2010.

In the mean time, my 36 year old husband and 3 year old daughter and I are moving to Vancouver, Canada. We’ve been talking about it for years… here we go!