The 2014 post that I wrote was about my move into bioinformatics as well as a move to Switzerland. Specifically, working in the Oncology disease area of Novartis Biomedical Research.
The 2019 post that I wrote had me back in Minneapolis and working for Carrot Health. Still related to health - data engineering for predictive models in health care (social determinants of health, healthcare quality, etc.).
So, you can tell I did NOT start blogging again - and now it’s been 6 years.
Based on COVID work protocols, Novartis allowed for remote work in the disease areas and a position opened up with the Oncology team. I was fortunate to return in Oct 2020. I was even more fortunate to be able to retire, just before my 60th birthday, in June 2025.
Thus I can say that I truly will be blogging more - for real. I just converted my old Wordpress blog into this Quarto-based one.
And I have a bunch of projects - some are based in Minneapolis. I’m serving as the Twin Cities city captain for Bits-in-Bio. I’m also spending more time with ISAIAH - a pro-democracy multi-racial, multi-faith group here in Minnesota.
On the bioinformatics side, there are also a ton of projects.
- A system for bringing Specification by Example to R libraries - starting with the pharmaverse
- A system for collecting genome and gene references in parquet / duckdb
- Single-cell / Spatial dataset conversion with duckdb (using the hdf5 extension)
- Improvements to the OMOP CDM data model
- VCFs at scale (potentially with Zarr)
- Potentially some algorithms using simplicial topology with multi-omic datasets (spatial transcriptomics + H&E stain images)
- and lots more (literally, I have a page of potential projects)
Here in Minnesota, residents at age 62 can attend classes at the UMN for free. In a few years, I’ll be going back to school but I’m not sure what classes I’ll be pursuing.
In short, stay tuned - there will be more getting published here. I’ll also add notifications to new blog posts on Mastodon and LinkedIn - links you can find at the top of this page.