About Me
In my previous lives I was a board-eligible genetic counselor, a grad student and postdoc in human genetics at Case Western Reserve University, a market researcher covering the biotech industry, and an underemployed consultant to various life sciences concerns. My next brilliant career move was to get an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. My fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Best New American Voices Anthology, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Tin House and elsewhere. My mother wants you to know that I was once nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
I came to Duke in 2003 (and not a moment too soon, according to both my wife and accountant). I am easily distracted and probably have some sort form of ADD; thus, in my, uh, spare time I continue to dote on my daughters, play guitar in a band, collect books, and watch my beloved Pittsburgh sports teams.
I work as an Assistant Professor in the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (although this site and its content are my own).
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it. I am interested in the relevant technologies and especially the attendant privacy and other ethical/legal/social issues.
This blog may also discuss some of my non-genome interests or, to paraphrase Dwight Yoakam, "Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, etc etc."
The header image comes from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's multimedia performance piece, "Ferocious Beauty: Genome."