In my words

Executive profile

I am a technology, data, and AI executive. For thirty years, high-stakes institutions have brought me in to build or rebuild the organizations they cannot afford to get wrong, and to make them outperform. I lead the organizational change that makes AI and data create governed value, and I have carried outcomes where error had regulatory, patient, or scientific consequences.

The throughline

My career does not fit one lane, and that is deliberate. I get handed broken or greenfield technology and research-computing organizations inside demanding, high-scrutiny institutions, and I make them outperform. The capability is institutional and it travels: turnaround, governance, trust, and building teams that outperform. The breadth is the evidence that it transfers.

I work differently from most technology leaders. I am unusually hands-on and technically deep for someone at my level, and I can hold my own with the scientists and engineers I lead. I win through people. I hire, turn around, retain, and motivate exceptional teams rather than trying to do it all myself. That capability is what has let me succeed across a hospital, a pharmaceutical company, elite research universities, a public university, and a private-sector medical-device venture.

Where I have done it

  • University of Rhode Island (today). As CIO and Associate Vice President of IT, I lead essentially all of the university's technology: central IT, research computing, information security, enterprise systems, and teaching-and-learning technology.
  • Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. As the school's inaugural CIO and Assistant Dean for Computing, I rebuilt a fractured IT and computing organization, cut real IT spend by nearly 30%, and expanded the research computing available to faculty and students roughly fifty-fold at effectively no added cost, through partnerships and shared-infrastructure agreements rather than new spending.
  • Massachusetts General Hospital. I directed clinical research informatics, supporting the work of a large community of clinicians and researchers.
  • Millennium/Takeda. I worked in regulated pharmaceutical data, including winning FDA and EMA acceptance of a validated data approach that helped bring a breakthrough cancer therapy to patients sooner. I also architected and prototyped the next-generation successor to Millennium's Sequence Explorer® sequence-analysis software, later productionized by a team for licensing.
  • Harvard neuroinformatics. I co-founded and led a neuroinformatics group that became internationally recognized, and I earned the trust of a research faculty that was, at first, deeply skeptical. They ultimately voted to fund the position from their own departmental resources, at a time when I did not hold a terminal degree.

The venture chapter: operator-inventor mode

I also build outside institutions, and that work is best read by what I built.

Inside a medical-device venture, I invented and own the SmartNode secure-identity appliance, along with the SmartHub and SmartLayer2. I took SmartNode from concept to a full working, tested prototype and validated it at Massachusetts General Hospital, running it for several months on a heavily used research-grade MRI and proving it could secure a high-throughput device without degrading performance. It won "Best and Most Novel Data Security Solution" at the 2019 US Business News Technology Elite Awards. I served as CITO of SmartPoints Medical and SmartPoints IoT and remain a member of the family of companies' Technology Advisory Board.

Earlier, I founded and sold Clotho, an internet-technology firm in Madison, Wisconsin, and I have been building software and computing systems since the early 1990s, including web-based systems for the University of Wisconsin supporting tens of thousands of users.

The pattern in this work is the same one that runs through the institutional turnarounds. I am brought into difficult, greenfield, or high-risk situations, and I build real, corroborated things.

How I think about AI

Most AI initiatives fail on organizational reality rather than on the technology. The model is rarely the hard part. The institution is. My work is making AI, data, and computing create real, governed, measurable value inside organizations where rigor, regulation, and trust are essential, and doing it without the hype. I think about AI-enabled productivity as reducing low-value work, redesigning workflows, and creating institutional capacity, done responsibly.

Now

I am CIO and AVP of IT at the University of Rhode Island. In 2025 I launched URI's Institute for AI and Computational Research, funded at no net cost to the university out of savings I had already generated. I serve on the boards of the Northeast Research and Education Network (NEREN) and the Massachusetts AI and Computational Resources initiative, chair URI's IT Governance Committee, and testified before the Rhode Island Senate AI Committee in 2026. I am a doctoral candidate in Sociology. I am available for speaking, and open to selective board and advisory work.

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