I had been kicking around an idea with my wife for some time for a community based website that would serve better than those currently available for restaurant ratings. My idea was to get rid of the ratings and take the focus off the restaurant and place it onto the food. To my mind, if a site is going to provide valuable information on a the best of just about anything what is required is at least relative objectivity. Now, when it comes to food, this may seem very difficult, but actually it wasn't; I just needed to ask the right question. This question which served as the core of the site was "where do you go when you want to eat...?" and it strips away a good deal of the superfluous. When you know what you want to eat, and you are ready to get up and spend the money, where do you most often go for that particular dish. Thus was born "Find That Dish" which became one element of my new venture; WebMeetsSight.

Another element of the company would be consulting in the technical space, though I would make special effort to focus on the technical space within healthcare related industries. At this time, my personal study had begun to shift and finally focused on Immunology so as my knowledge grew broader and deeper, so did my desire to merge my professional life and my passion.

After a slow '08 and '09, things began to come together in 2010. I received an unusual request to manage several ongoing digital advertising projects at a pharma/biotech advertising agency while the director was traveling for a month. I had never worked in an ad agency and the contract was actually only a few weeks in length, but the content of the digital projects I was to manage was exactly what I had been studying. It was the intersection I had been trying to make for some time and the people were fun and intelligent making my inevitable departure all the more difficult to contemplate.

I had only a few days with the director in the office to get up to speed on several projects, learn how an ad agency worked, and determine how to overlay IT project management practices and concerns onto a traditional print ad paradigm. It was hectic at first, but by the second week I had a handle on things and was not only managing efficiently, but leveraging my studies to enhance my execution. In one instance while reviewing a video in production I was able to spot a element that did not represent the underlying biology and with quick work by the account manager, we were able to rectify the problem early. I was catching the stride and even absorbed enough to make it through a meeting without checking my notes in an environment with more acronyms than the military. Unfortunately, like the earlier instances when I was in a positive environtment, it disappeared, the only difference this time is that I knew it was coming. Once the director returned he tried to make my position permenant, but to no avail.

Continuing on the quest, I took another short term contract as a Management Consultant with PFizer which was a nice experience on the whole. However, I had also started writing essays a few months prior, first on U.S. History then I got up the nerve to tackle topics in Immunology. I was a bit torn on which audience I would write to since my original thought of sharing the wonders of our molecular selves with everyone was not lending itself well to the short work format of a blog. I decided, at first to assume, a college level biology level of knowledge, but as my study expanded to include Cancer Immunology and specifically Targeted Cancer Therapies. After watching a presentation at the NIH on webcast, I had an idea which I forwarded to someone I didn't know, but who, from what I could read, seemed to have a bright mind and a broad perspective.

He responded right away and was kind and supportive and then a few months later when news from that NIH presentation hit, he suggested I should express my idea completely by writing a paper. I decided to go ahead and do it even though I was considerably out of my element. My first thought was that if there was any chance the work could spark a real idea in an actual researcher, then it was down-time well spent. My second thought was that since I was also considering a career change to bio science writing, this would be a nice addition to my body of work.

With the paper complete and, amazingly, actually under consideration for publication, I am again continuing my quest; looking for a new, and hopefully much longer, engagement which will leverage my long and broad experience in technology and software development management with my passion for the bio sciences. At the same time, however, I will keep working to create my own opportunities with WebMeetsSight, bioscience writing, and, again amazingly, looking for funding to test the core principle of my idea.