University of Virginia School of Medicine

University of Virginia School of Medicine - 1979 to 1986

Summary:

Youngest paid researcher at UVA School of Medicine at 14, recruited after scoring “>170 IQ off the chart” in UVA’s gifted research program. Engineered the first-ever lab-scale integration of analog lab equipment with digital computers, pioneering automated biomedical data collection and transforming scientific research.

University of Virginia
University of Virginia School of Medicine
Commenced work over two summers as an intern, starting at age of 12
Converted to hourly employee with an Anatomy research lab at age of 14
Converted to full-time employee researcher at age of 16

Commenced work as intern designing circuit boards and driver software to assist graduate students in anatomy lab with their data collection and experimental process controls.

On these projects I worked alone, and then mentored/taught both graduate student and professorial staff how to use the equipment and darkroom I had modified through integrating electronics, software, and biological research. My work impacted biomedical research at a professional level before most people even enter college.

Designed custom amplifiers and A/D conversion board to collect voltage data across various membranes with different solutions on each side of membrane. One such system was instrumental in published experiment "Extended sensitivity for the calcium selective electrode"

The anatomy lab I worked in specialized in the field of vision, the chemical processes involved, and the neurological structures supporting those.

At one point, I tasked myself with the complete automation of a 100% darkroom lab that had a dozen pieces of analog process equipment which had knobs, dials, and switches for input, and the output was typically status lights or paper scroll graph. Because of the darkroom environment, all lamps and other lights sources had to be disabled by cutting their circuit leads. I paralleled computer controls over GPIB with each knob, dial, and switch using D/A converters, TTY latches, and relays as appropriate. For the output of those machines, I converted each status lamp to a latched TTL input which was returned to the computer via GPIB. I wrote all of the drivers for the GPIB controls and indicators in 6502 assembler. For the output graph from a photo-spectrometer and HPLC, I used an A/D converter sampling at 10 times per second and fed that data to the computer via GPIB.

In order to communicate with the human experimenter in the darkroom, I used audio output in the form of prerecorded and encoded voice snippets. For the human operator to control the system, I wrote what I now believe was one of the first speaker independent voice recognition systems, using one algorithm for detecting breathing pauses, and another pitch independent algorithm with vector quantized inputs to detect matches with words in a predefined dictionary. The dictionary had about 70 words, each expressed in a parametric form.

Technical Lead, mentorship and instructional skills, and real-world impact for leading edge research laboratory. Due to my status as an employee with the University, I was able to take courses for credit and audit other courses. I was creating and understanding experimental research goals and translate them into custom hardware/software solutions.

The lab I automated got many visits from companies who sent engineers to understand what I had done with their equipment -- Fisher Scientific, Tektronix, Beckman, EE&G, Hewlett Packard, Perkin-Elmer, Varian, Bio-Rad, Waters HPLC, among others.

GPIB
HPIB
S-100
Z80
6502
6809
RCA COSMAC 1802
8" floppy - MFM formatting
5" floppy - FM formatting
8088
8086
Commodore SuperPET
Commodore PET
KayPro
Seequa Chameleon
TI-99/4A
TMS9900
Speech synthesis
Speaker independent Speech recognition

Analytical Biochemistry
. 1986 Sep;157(2):345-52.  doi: 10.1016/0003-2697(86)90636-6.
Extended sensitivity for the calcium selective electrode

R W Morton, J K Chung, J L Miller, J P Charlton, R S Fager
PMID: 3777438 DOI: 10.1016/0003-2697(86)90636-6

Fisher Scientific
Tektronix
Beckman
Hewlett Packard
Perkin-Elmer
Varian
Bio-Rad
Waters HPLC