Meet the NetResearch Advisory Panel
Meet the NetResearch Advisory PanelThe Advisory Panel members quoted throughout throughout NetResearch have diverse backgrounds. Here are some brief biographies; if you see an email address, the panel member is interested in receiving your questions and comments.
When that project was completed, Robert Strandh invited her to attend an academic conference in Bordeaux, France, and the food was so good that they both decided to move there. They have lived happily in France for nine years now. Nowadays, Kathleen works as a technical writer for ILOG, a multinational French corporation producing C++ libraries for business and industrial applications, a position that exploits her combined computing, teaching, and editing experience.
Ellie started out her professional life as a musician, graduating from Utah State University with a degree in voice and violin. She moved back to the East coast to be music director at a boys' boarding school, where she also filled the roles of "dorm mom" and soccer coach. From there she joined a band in Boston that played Irish music and "whatever we'd get paid for" in bars, clubs, and pubs. She also sang with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, the official chorus of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where she got to perform under conductors such as Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa.
Eventually tiring of "not knowing where my next paycheck would come from," Ellie joined the staff of the New England Food Co-Op as the cheese buyer. When the company started up a trucking department, she got a tractor-trailer license and ended up wheeling all around the Northeast delivering Co-Op goods. She eventually became director of the trucking department, which involved coordinating runs and managing the warehouse.
It wasn't until she injured her back on the job that she considered writing as a profession; she picked up a certificate in technical writing and went to work. At a meeting for the Society of Technical Communications, she heard a talk about O'Reilly and thought, "Wow, I'd love to work there!" Two years later, after working on a newspaper copy desk and at a software company near the Canadian border, she saw a help wanted ad and applied.
Currently, Ellie is Director of Web Services for O'Reilly. She predicts that in the future, as sites learn how to handle commercial transactions and as more bandwidth becomes available, the Web will be as much a place to do business as the telephone or the Yellow Pages.
Fern Dickman began her computing career in the early '80s with one of the first AT computers hot off the assembly line, and was totally blown away by the speed. She and computers have come a long way since then.
Her career started out in an Information Center at a large, national credit card company. End-user support became a career path in this job, and each subsequent job has allowed her the opportunity to learn more about computers, particularly PC-DOS machines. From the credit card company, she went to a managed health care consulting company and learned the ins and outs of the Xbase language and Novell networks. After that, she worked in the MIS department of a large hospital in Baltimore. Unfortunately, major cost cuttings resulted in the loss of that job after less than a year, but it resulted in her employment at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland where she has been employed since 1991. Her current position is System Manager for the three Clinical Research Centers within the school.
Being the System Manager in an academic environment has its challenges, not the least of which is continually having to learn new operating systems as the technology rapidly changes. Initially, the operation system of choice was VMS on a MicroVax 3500. Three years ago, the center acquired a Unix system, and this was totally overwhelming. Fern swears that even though she was able to set up a Unix system with X-terminals, dial-in and networking once, she could never do it again. She also thought that about Windows NT at first, but having now had to uninstall and reinstall that operating system a number of times in the past year, she realizes that particular assumption was incorrect.
In addition to managing the various systems in the Clinical Research Center, Fern provides support to the staff of the CRC which includes medical faculty, administrators, research associates and nurses. With this varied group of people having daily demands and needs in order to perform their jobs, it has become a neverending task to keep everything up and running.
Since 1985, Harv Laser has been a sysop on various online services (People/Link, Portal, and currently CalWeb), focusing his efforts on supporting owners of Amiga computers. He has helped to educate thousands of people on the ins and outs of telecommunications, helping to demystify it for them and make it a more enjoyable and productive experience.
Harv has also written hundreds of reviews and opinion pieces for over a dozen Amiga-specific magazines, authored several software manuals, developed web sites, spoken on trade show panels and at many user groups, and spends a couple of hours each day getting his daily "fix" of Usenet and web info to share with his customers and for his own twisted purposes. (Heh heh.)
In addition to his computer interests, Harv has a B.A. in Art History from California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH).
Robert Strandh received a Master's degree in Computer Science and Technology from the University of Linköping in Sweden in 1979, after which he worked in industry for several years, mostly as a programmer. He then moved to the United States, where he was introduced to the Internet and earned a Ph.D. in computer science at The Johns Hopkins University in 1987.
Immediately after graduation, Robert moved to Bordeaux, France
to work as an associate professor at the computer science laboratory
of the University of Bordeaux, the first such laboratory in
France to be connected to the Net. Since 1989, he has been a tenured
professor at the University of Bordeaux.