I was born in Columbus, Ohio, but my parents moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin when I was about 2 years old. Hence, I am forever a cheesehead!!! My family still lives in Wisconsin. Thanks to my brother and sister (and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, of course), I have 6 beautiful and wonderful nieces and nephews. Being here on the east coast, I miss them very much and I can't wait to go home and see them again. I've started to put some pictures of them on my Family page.
I went to high school at Brookfield East High School and college at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, obtaining a degree in Medical Science in 1993. I fell in love with Madison. It has a charm which is unique in the Midwest. Everyone who knows me has probably gotten sick of me raving about Wisconsin and Madison, in particular. What can I say? When you've been to paradise, it's hard to stop talking about it... After graduating, I enrolled at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, where I received my MD in May of 1996.
I did my internal medicine residency at the New England Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts (see my Work page) and became a full-fledged doc on June 30th, 1999. The more time that I've spent away from NEMC, the more I've learned to appreciate the lessons and training that I acquired there. At the time, however, it seemed like hell. Luckily, I had a bunch of friends going through the same process and they made hell seem manageable.
After residency, I worked as a 'locum tenens' physician for about 6 months in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Minnesota. I was drawn away from clinical medicine by the dot-com gold rush, but I left without any gold. I worked for a company called medicalrecords.com. Our goal was to provide a secure place for the storage of health records, while also giving users personalized information, tools and programs to improve their health. It was a very exciting project and I'm sure it will live again, once someone figures out a way to make money from it.
The big upside of my time away from medicine was that I got to reacquaint myself with my love of programming. I've donated a lot time to the OpenACS project and received an amazing amount of education and experience in return.
My day job is as an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at New York Medical College (Metropolitan Hospital), splitting my time between patient care and teaching. I moved to NYC in June of 2002 and have slowly been getting used to being an attending physician. I feel lucky to have the opportunity to take care of underserved patients in East Harlem while teaching physicians who hail from around the world (and often know much more than I do).
I am a proud member of the Association of Kerala Medical Graduates, the New York Road Runners Club, the Dead Runners Society, the Free Software Foundation (#1088), the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the New York Botanical Gardens.