Originally I'm from around the Philadelphia area. I've lived in a a bunch of different places after college. I worked in Boston for a couple of years, went to school around Chicago, worked in Pittsburgh and Atlanta and now I've been in Ithaca, New York for the last couple of years. I've also lived very briefly in Washington DC, so I've been around a bunch of different places within the US. In terms of hobbies, I have sung when I was ten years old and I don't have a whole lot of free time right now. When I'm not working and hanging out with my family, I like to work out a little bit. In addition to more structured activities, when the weather is nice, my son and I will ride bikes. He likes to play Iacrosse, so lately we've been tossing the ball around. I like to read a little bit. I have no big passions in terms of hobbies or anything like that.

Things are a little different at Cornell. We have a College of Business, and then within each of those colleges of business, we have different schools. We have the Johnson school, which has the MBA program. I'm in the Dyson school, which prominently has undergraduate, but also some masters programs and the PhD, which I'll speak about briefly. We also have a hotel school. The undergraduate business program at the Dyson school shares some similarities to other undergraduate business school programs, but it's also a little bit different. Officially the school is called the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. The school evolved out of an Applied Economics program, which in turn evolved out of an Agricultural Economics program. We have some areas of Business and Management that look a lot like other business schools. We have concentrations in Strategy, Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Business Analytics. But we also have some concentrations that look a little bit different. We have some in Energy, Bio and Natural resources. We have some in Food Industry Management and Agribusiness Management. We do have some programs that are a little bit different. The tagline for the school is, "Our business is a better world." Because of our proximity to New York City and a variety of other reasons, many of our students are very interested in Finance and get jobs on Wall Street. That would be one of the top concentrations. There's also a lot of interest in Entrepreneurship now. More recently, Business Analytics has become very popular. In terms of our graduate programs, we have MPS programs in things like Technology Management, Environmental Energy and Resource Economics, International Development Economics and we also offer a PhD program in similar areas. We have a PhD program which spans areas of Management as well as areas of Agricultural Economics, Development Economics and Environmental Energy and Resource Economics. Those are the graduate programs. Most of the MBA programs are in the Johnson school, which is one of our sister schools within the College of Business.

In terms of my research career, I've been interested in two broad areas. One is a long running interest about the impact of IT on business. When businesses invest in Information Technology, commonly there is believed to be a lot of organizational changes and adaptation that need to be made to implement IT systems successfully. My research interest in that area has specifically been around geography. For quite some time, I've been interested in what types of firms benefit most from Information Technology investment, those in rural areas or those in urban areas. When the commercial internet started to diffuse, there was a belief that it would lead to the death of distance, and people in geographically isolated areas would disproportionately benefit. Over time, we came to understand that this was perhaps a bit more naive. The benefits of adopting IT might be highest for businesses that might be geographically isolated; but there are a lot of complementary investments that need to go around that are involved in investing in new IT systems. That is easier to do in cities. One of the more recent projects that I've been doing in that regard looked at the adoption of electronic medical record systems and hospitals. One of the things that we found was that the benefits of adopting those systems accrued disproportionately to hospitals that were located in urban areas, who had access to labor markets for IT professionals that were helping them to implement those types of systems. For a long time, I've been interested in this relationship between the benefits of IT systems and where you're located. Another area that I have worked on has looked at the commercialization strategies of software firms. It was less on the demand side of IT and more on the supply side. In particular, I've been interested in innovation strategy in software firms. There's been a lot of attention in the press about intellectual property rights in software. A computer or mobile phone involves many different components. Those components have been developed by different firms. Those different firms often hold IP rights associated with those components. If you're going to build a smartphone, you need to get licenses to use these different components in order to produce these products successfully without infringing upon the IP rights of these components. There's a belief that this may make it more difficult to produce new IT products because there is what's known as a patent thicket that develops around all of these IT rights that particularly new firms may have to navigate. One of the things that I've been interested in has been institutional mechanisms that have been devised that may help firms to navigate these patent thickets. For example, I have a research project that looked at a Patent Commons that IBM and a number of other firms were involved in, which essentially provided access to firms who were working in an open source software to arrange software patents. They can use these patents license free. We were interested in this question of how support from traditional firms in the IT space in promoting open source might help to encourage startup firms to develop firms under an open source license, by helping them to navigate these patent thickets. I've been doing a couple of different projects in this regard. I have another project looking similarly at the role of standard setting organizations and whether they may help firms navigate the intellectual property environments related more to computer network.