At my core, I build; I create; I’m curious; I bring energy. I’m very disciplined at completing and finishing, but in a world where people identify with a specialized career, I’m not very good at doing just one thing. I wish I were. It’s a lot easier to have a direct line for who you want to be. It’s easier to have one thing that you’re obviously best at. I don’t have that.
My only sister has an intellectual disability, and I grew up with her as my first and greatest teacher. She taught me compassion and how to avoid being easily annoyed. I had to be steady for her when no one else could, especially as I grew into adulthood. I had to become good at many things to serve her needs. I couldn’t just be a cool boy. Her needs always came first – even when I didn’t like it.
For my job, I co-invent software to help biomedical researchers advance their career. I work “making research careers easier” with the Edge for Scholars team at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. We help make sure our researchers have every “edge” to contribute professionally. Access to cutting-edge research attracts many patients regionally, nationally, and globally to our medical center. Our team offers opportunities to early career-researchers that frankly no one else offers.
Because I’m an obsessive reader – averaging about 90 pages per day – I maintain this blog to write about what I read. Doing so helps me to formulate how reading impacts my life. I read about anything that’s in front of me. If I’m being challenged to be a better leader, I read about that. If I encounter an obscure area of science, I might read up on that. I also try to read things that help me to be a better person generally. Since I spend time in my car running errands for my family, I listen to audiobooks when driving alone.
My career path has been all over the place. Generally, I’m most passionate about building things like programs, institutions, software, and media. I’m scrappy about how I do that and don’t limit myself to one craft. My religious identity as a Christian has taught me practices of servant leadership. Although I’m not outwardly vocal about religion, curiosity about God fuels my internal fire for my work to contribute to the wider world.
In high school, I helped build our high school newspaper to statewide awards while taking a hard academic course load. At Clemson University, I built up a technology-informed college church in the early days of the Internet while majoring in computer science and minoring in religion. During that time under the tutelage of a Jewish professor, I grew deeply interested in Christian theological history. I graduated determined to build a career as a theological historian. I started to teach myself koine Greek and ecclesiastical Latin and took a course in biblical Hebrew. As I soon discovered, those efforts would not be my professional path.
I attended Princeton Seminary and lived a few doors down from Albert Einstein’s old house. After one year, however, I came down with bipolar disorder, and my life literally fell apart. I went from a top-performing student to entering a psychiatric hospital unable to function. It took about one entire year for me and my doctors to figure out what was going on. Seminary is a place to prepare for a ministerial career, and listening for one’s calling by God is an expected activity. Feeling called to a new religious vocation, I decided to focus on medicine with the rest of my career.
While working a job writing computer code, I started to take pre-med classes and married during that time. I married well. My wife spent the first 12 years of her career as a special ed. teacher – a perfect fit for my sister. My parents were almost exclusively driven by my father’s career in their life. They were economically prosperous, but I wanted to have a better home life. While I still enjoy working hard, my wife and I have built our own small domestic culture with one child and two cats. With an impressive career portfolio herself, she works as a teacher in Metro Nashville Public Schools.
I ended up going to the Medical University of South Carolina in the MD program. Unfortunately, almost from day one, my bipolar disorder held me back. Many students shortchange themselves on sleep in medical school, but I had to sleep about two hours more because of medication. My psychiatrist and I tried to adjust medications to maximize my performance, but despite multiple changes, that effort completely failed.
I struggled through medical school because of those performance limitations. Over time, I grew to be in survival mode. Clinical rotations in different services and overnight call became huge challenges just to show up on time with alertness – forgetting about learning to become a physician. Something clearly had to change. My mentors saw it, my wife saw it, and I saw it.
I value the time I spent on the “front lines” of medicine. I still see a purpose of my work to help patients in any way possible. I got to deliver babies, witness addiction treatments, direct primary care, watch a heart transplant operation, and help people as they die. But for lack of better words, it’s not where God wanted me.
That’s where being involved in a lot of different activities helped. I got to fall back on my computer-programming background. I learned about the field of biomedical informatics that crosses computer science and medicine. My wife and I looked at good institutions in the field. Because of evidence-based effectiveness of academic medical centers, I wanted to stay inside the realm of academic medicine. We ended up identifying Vanderbilt University in Nashville and moved there with our young infant.
Since New Year’s Eve in 2013, I’ve worked at the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. Given my broad background, I’m a bit of an odd fit. Unlike other developers, I have experiences and knowledge in fields other than computers. I keep up with software trends, have a deep appreciation of the wider healthcare field, and learn daily from my colleagues. Most importantly, the work requirements are compatible with maintaining my mental health.
My work started with helping the REDCap team pioneer their mobile app. REDCap, built by a Vanderbilt team, is the leading data-collection tool for academic research, and the mobile app helps research programs collect data in places that don’t have strong mobile signals. I wrote the code and performed initial deployments of the software. In a unique experience, I’d sometimes start work at 7am on my kitchen table to collaborate with researchers from Kenya. It’s pretty fun seeing your work have such an immediate impact on research projects.
Since 2016, I have mainly worked with the Edge for Scholars team at Vanderbilt. We built several tools to help Vanderbilt become premier for those who want to build a biomedical research career. Creating great software is always a team effort. Leading among our tools is Flight Tracker for Scholars, a REDCap-based tool that makes tracking researchers’ accomplishments much easier.
In late 2024, Edge for Scholars leadership wanted me to transition to focus more on leading through ideas and special projects. We’ve been able to add a couple of other REDCap-related developers to lead our coding efforts instead. I never dreamed of being a program manager, so I’m learning what I’m doing as I go.
Overall, I’m committed to advancing the ever-evolving healthcare industry and governance structures through software. I learn all I can about how to help advance scientific efforts. I love working hard to fill needs in the research and medical landscape. I still get to dabble in historical theology by coordinating a Sunday School class for intellectuals at my church and take deep pride in being involved in the comings-and-goings of my wife and child. It’s certainly not the life I planned or designed. It’s the life I live, and I’m happy in it.