>> I was going to be in academic.
I have a PhD in geography, which is not pharmaceuticals.
[Laughs] I have an undergraduate degree in biology,
but with a focus on genetic molecular biology.
And I was working with large-scale data looking at the effect
of climate and air pollution on mortality.
So I do a lot of statistical programming, used different software packages,
one was STATA [phonetic], one was SAS [phonetic],
support train [phonetic] programming, and did my PhD in that area.
I was associate -- first assistant professor and then a tenured associate professor
at the University of Alberta in Canada.
I decided it would be nice to come back to Delaware, and I had an opportunity
to come back to Delaware where I'm from.
And I did some work for the University of Delaware as an adjunct professor in geography,
wrote some grant proposals, and then really came up with --
found an opportunity for this field that I didn't know existed, called "Health Economics
and Outcomes Research," where they use a lot of large-scale dataset.
So my skills in programming and working with large data and healthcare data put me
in a very good position to start out.
So I went from being a professor in charge of my own program, a couple steps back,
although the pay was pretty good, to actually being a research analyst.
I was a senior analyst where I did my own programming, became a subject matter expert
in the disease area, and I learned a lot about different pharmaceutical treatments
for various diseases in an area called "comparative [inaudible] research."
So once the drug is approved, which drug works better in the long term
in the way people actually use the drugs.
There my project management experience in leadership and being an academic kind
of running my own research program at University of Alberta translated.
I moved up.
I then worked for another company doing similar work at a higher level of responsibility,
and then saw this opportunity for this new company, which was nice because I had worked
for some large corporations, and my company is smaller.
It has more of an academic feel.
It's about 100 people in our office.
In the US it's about 10 people and growing.
So it's been a lot of back and forth, but it's interesting because I do see this
as a coherent trajectory in that I see a lot
of the skills I've learned along the way are very applicable to what I do now.