by Angela Guess
Adam Bluestein of FastCompany recently interviewed Charlie Schick, IBM’s top Big Data guy. Bluestein writes, ” As a marketing director in IBM’s Big Data group, Charlie Schick helps scientists and health care providers use computing to pick out meaningful patterns from chaotic-seeming sequencing data or volumes of digital medical records. His resume might suggest he charted a path to get here–an important position in a huge company, working at the bleeding edge of the convergence of biology and computing. But chaos played a big part in Schick’s career, too; a nearly unbounded curiosity is the thread that runs through it.”
He continues, “After college, Schick spent 12 years doing post-graduate research in molecular biology at MIT and Children’s Hospital Boston, and teaching as a junior faculty member at Harvard Medical School. He spent another decade working as a tech journalist and doing marketing, product development, and online media at Finnish phone maker Nokia, before returning to the U.S., immersing himself in Boston’s DIY bio scene, and ultimately finding a new way to deploy his unique skill set. Here, Schick discusses his atypical career path, and the modern necessity of being a polymath.”
photo credit: IBM
