1. What’s the best book you’ve read recently? Where to start!?! I thoroughly enjoyed The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene, both by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It was fascinating to understand the history of our world. It is also amazing to realize how much progress has been made in learning more about the world we live in.  It was also humbling to realize how little we understand about cancer or biology. This subject interests me since my PhD research focused on a potential cancer diagnosis system.

2. If you could play any instrument, what would it be and why? The trumpet. As a kid there was a trumpeter who would play well-known songs. The amount of emotion he was able to express with the instrument has remained with me all these years.

3. What’s a trip that changed you, and why? My father, a physician, took me to the USSR (now Russia) in 1987.  He went as part of a US/USSR medical training conference to learn about the Soviet health care system and interact with health care professionals. It was on that trip that I learned about the big, wide world.  Even before we got to our destination, the airline lost our luggage in Ireland (I think). The Moscow mall had multiple stores selling the exact same government-issued socks for the exact same government-set price. As a kid, this really blew my mind. It was like entering another world.

The conference coordinators’ carefully choreographed and monitored travel routes through the ritziest parts of Moscow failed to keep my father from going rogue. He skipped a session. He just picked me up and we chose a direction to head out of the hotel.  We walked straight into a less desirable area of town, turned around and walked back to the hotel.  The billboards were all filled with propaganda about the single-party Socialist system.

Sochi, next to the Black Sea, was summertime fun. We swam with swarms of jellyfish and I played table tennis all day long. In the industrial city of Krasnodar, I saw my first and only Soviet hospital.

Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) was cool, even in summer. We purchased a samovar, a metal tea urn, which I still have to this day. There, we were advised not to drink the water. But we were offered horse milk to drink.  I didn’t know what to think and looked around to see everyone else’s reaction. We each received a shot glass of horse milk, and each of the other Americans politely sipped some and returned the rest.  Not my father. He flipped the shot glass and drank the horse milk in one gulp. I will never forget the look on his face as he turned toward me: horror. Horse milk is thinner than cow milk and tastes like a horse smells: earthy and grassy. This caused a physical response, akin to having a brain freeze.
 
My father passed earlier this year, so these memories are even more precious to me now.

4. What’s your most-used productivity hack? Automated rules. My docketing system includes templates for mail merge. My Outlook includes automated rules for forwarding emails to my VA. Per my SOPs, the VA then sends requests for electronic signature with automated reminders. See my answer to what I’m really bad at.
 
5. What’s something—big or small—that you’re really bad at? Follow up. I am forced to docket every little thing, otherwise it is lost forever.
 
6. If you could change one thing in the world, what would it be? Inequality. Everyone has potential. Everyone has a contribution to make. No one is more valuable than another.
 
7. What’s the coolest thing you’re working on right now? Due to attorney-client privilege, the coolest publicly accessible invention I can speak about is a family of patent applications utilizing FTIR Microspectroscopy: “Analytical method for common and specific characterization of skin carcinogenesis by FTIR Microspectroscopy, a formula and method for monitoring individual metabolic response and for generating predictive medical metrics, and skin cancer biomarker detection by infrared spectroscopy.“ As of today, two of the three cases have issued and the last is allowed.
 
8. What aspects of tech transfer energize you? I just listened to IPO Education Foundations Podcast: Stroke of Genius S3 E7 Climbing Towards a Cure For Cancer. That podcast discussed 2018 Nobel Prize Winner Tasuku Honjo’s research on cancer immunotherapy. It energizes me to see how research can lead to saving lives.
 
9. If you could offer a tech transfer newbie any advice, what would it be? You are not alone. AUTM and all its Members are here to help, teach, train and whatever else you need.