Home is currently NYC. I’ve also lived in Japan, Argentina and Spain, and I love to travel- here’s my flightmemory map:
Covid put a serious damper on my travel, but I made up for it- as soon as I got vaccinated, I thru-hiked all 2,193 miles of the Appalachian Trail. Here’s me at the end of the hike, on the summit of Mt. Katahdin, Maine:
Work
I currently work at Atypon where I serve as Director of Publishing Technology and on the business development team. We run a platform that hosts half of the world’s scholarly research journals, including Science, Cell, Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine. I am responsible for evangelizing our technology and creating custom solutions for high-impact publishers, with a focus on engineering and medical research. In 2016, Atypon was acquired by Wiley, and the following year I got to join my Wiley colleagues in ringing the closing bell at the NYSE:
I have worked for LGBTQ+ rights, both professionally and as a volunteer, for the last 20 years at national organizations such as GLSEN, Commercial Closet (now GLAAD), the DEI committee of ALPSP and most recently as chair of the junior board at Lambda Legal. Our board served as Grand Marshals of the 2018 NYC pride parade, where I snapped this photo while marching down the middle of Fifth Avenue:
I founded ReConn, a startup that ran an expertise management platform for universities and a US national laboratory. ReConn spun out of my graduate school research and grew to a staff of 5 before I sunsetted the technology as part of my move to Atypon.
Prior to ReConn, I worked on a Wall Street trading floor and for a US Senator.
Education and teaching
I am a lifelong learner. I have trained as a pilot, chef and practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine. I had just started art school when Covid closed everything down. This is me staging for chef Rich LaMarita:
Carnegie Mellon is my alma mater. I crammed a lot into 4 years: a double major in Information Systems and Spanish and a masters in Management, all while rowing for the varsity crew team and secretly serving as the school mascot at football games. That’s me wearing CMU’s new Scotty Dog uniform, which I helped design:
During my last semester, I served as Team Lead for a student project consulting for Lehman Brothers. The photo below was taken in the lobby of their Times Square headquarters on September 26th, 2008 as painters scraped the bank’s name off the wall. We were smiling but nervous.
In graduate school, I earned a teaching certificate and served as Teaching Assistant for 4 statistics classes. I also created and taught a course on Complex Systems Engineering using aviation disasters as case studies, such as the famous case of Japan Air Lines Flight 123:
Selected works
Scholarly articles: Putting an end to download-and-go: The website’s role in a content marketing ecosystem, Learned Publishing. The truth and consequences of Brexit: could a catastrophe for academia be an opportunity for publishers?, UKSG Insights
Conference presentations and panels: Society for Scholarly Publishing (various), Engage (various), NISO Plus (2022), Researcher to Reader (2022 and 2019), Forum Forward (2021), Frankfurt Book Fair (2018), Access Innovations/Data Harmony (2017)
Book: Platinum Blazing- How to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail and still get a shower every night (Forthcoming; 2024)
Juried group shows: The Architecture of Time, American Institute of Architects (2020). Viewfinder, Miami Circle Contemporary Art (2019)
Op-Ed: Bridging two worlds, The Advocate
Blog: Jake’s Transit Project (discontinued 2013; archived here)