Professional background · 30+ years
My career has included automotive test engineering, custom systems integration, process control, technical leadership, industrial automation, and company operations. Much of the work has involved understanding how a system behaves and solving the problem in front of me.
Automotive test engineering
My career began with lube-oil filtration and fuel-filter testing at AC Rochester and its successors, followed by fuel-systems test engineering for a tier-one Chrysler supplier. Across those twelve years, I built automated test systems and worked extensively with instrumentation and LabVIEW.
Custom systems integration
I then worked for a custom systems integrator, building industrial machines and connecting LabVIEW, PLCs, instruments, sensors, and other equipment. The projects crossed several technical disciplines.
The Dow Chemical Company / R&D
I spent twelve years in Dow research and development as a process control engineer, working on laboratory systems, bench-scale experiments, and pilot plants across Dow businesses. I later became the R&D Technical Leader for Process Automation.
How I work
I am comfortable leading, but I do not assume I know everything. When someone else knows the subject better, I listen to them. My job is to set direction, give people room to work, and keep all of us—including me—accountable for the result.
I enjoy difficult problems and the challenge of making progress through them. The work means most when it contributes to something larger than my own part in it and makes a useful difference for the people who depend on it.
2019–Present
After leaving corporate R&D, I started several companies and took on a different set of responsibilities. Today, most of that work is at Molly’s Grape & Citrus Company and Mangrove Publishing.
My work crosses technology, corporate operations, financial systems, food safety, regulatory compliance, insurance, ERP infrastructure, and business development. In a growing company, many important responsibilities do not arrive with established departments or obvious owners. Much of my role has been to identify those gaps and build the operational structure required to grow.
I founded Mangrove Publishing for my fiction, memoir, and technical nonfiction. It is where I am building the writing career I began in 2025.
I founded AgroLytics to bring industrial control, cloud computing, big-data analysis, and machine learning into controlled-environment agriculture. The larger mission was to convert vacant commercial buildings into productive community assets: indoor farms capable of creating food, employment, technical training, and new purpose in underserved areas.
REAP—the Recipe-based Ecosystem for Agricultural Process—was the control architecture at its center. The technology was feasible; the financing and delivery environment proved harder to align.
I founded Iris Automation to provide project engineering, industrial automation, software integration, and technical service. Its work has included LabVIEW and PLC systems, discrete automation, and onsite and remote troubleshooting.
Patents
Both came out of engineering needs encountered during the work.