I grew up in Santa Barbara and Berkeley California. My parents were both professors at the University of California in those cities. I attended U.C. Berkeley as an undergraduate where I received my B.A. degree in Comparative Literature, with an emphasis in the Spanish language. After graduating, I went to work for Computer Sciences Corporation as a programmer analyst.

During my first 10 years out of school I had the good fortune to work at some of the leaders in the Silicon Valley high tech industry. These companies include Sun Microsystems, Netscape and McAfee.com. After joining the team that took McAfee.com public, I joined MedAmerica as the Director of Web Development.

At MedAmerica I implemented a staging and testing environment for their web development effort and created a web portal for California Emergency Physicians. In my capacity as director, I managed technical employees, participated in development and managed 5 medical websites.

After MedAmerica, I took the opportunity to go back to school. I enrolled in the graduate program of software engineering at Golden Gate University. I completed ninety percent of the program in hardcore software engineering, but changed over to the IT Management program in my final semester. The school was moving away from engineering and was changing the program to a more general business focus.

After completing my degree (MSITM) in 2004, I struggled to find my way back into an economy that was still reeling from the dot com crash. After a few consulting gigs I was able to get back to health care IT. I found work on a 2 year grant at the UCSF School of Medicine. At UCSF I developed a clinical application called a Total Parenteral Nutrition Calculator that is currently in a clinical trial in the Intensive Care Nursery. I also managed the development of the new neonatal web portal.

Since the grant period ended I took the time to do some travelling and continue to work with UCSF Neonatology in a project management capacity.