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Grew up as an expatriate in the United Arab Emirates. Went to Sharjah English School, then Dubai College (slow site) before heading off to Harvard in 1994. I studied biochemistry, focusing on gene transcription with Mark Ptashne, but also did some work on cellular imaging in Italy and computational protein-mechanics at the Shakhnovich protein biophysics group. I was taught C by Brian Kernighan, and used it to build a stochastic folding simulator that ran on several DEC Alpha machines running UNIX. Output was handled using Perl. Unfortunately, I don't think any of this code is publically available. Upon graduating I did a little SQL programming for DE Shaw(a hedge fund), then worked at the nonprofit Share Our Strength before doing customer experience consulting at Creative Good. I tried to spread some of the customer experience gospel at Monitor before going to the University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business where I learned economics. I then designed enormous call centers with IBM for a couple of equally enormous telco companies before heading back to Creative Good. I've also done a fair amount of strategy consulting, and built static Web sites for all sorts of folks, because HTML is Fun and the Internet is Good. |
