Klick

• Research generative AI tools, technologies, and trends
• Consult on client challenges amenable to generative AI solutions
• Conceptualize and prototype generative AI applications for improved health outcomes
• Identify and overcome barriers to facilitate generative AI deployment
• Discover and cultivate success stories to accelerate generative AI adoption
• Develop novel generative AI solutions for common industry challenges

EVP Generative AI

BenchSci

Inspired by recent progress in machine learning, I moved from an executive role to an individual contributor role at a leading AI product company to pursue my passion for AI engineering. Here's a glance at what I did:

• Explored innovative ways to use life science data to expedite research for leading pharmaceutical companies
• Developed scalable applications that harnessed large language models and other generative AI technologies
• Monitored, experimented with, and assessed machine learning models and tools to ensure our company responded appropriately to related changes in the technology landscape
• Generated application ideas that addressed business challenges, customer needs, and market and technology trends
• Built and refined models, pipelines, and full-stack applications using diverse tools
• Performed a wide range of engineering tasks, from data and prompt engineering, to model training, to backend and frontend development
• Led initiatives from R&D to production, maintaining a clear vision and strong communication

R&D Engineer

• Member of the senior leadership team, with responsibilities encompassing go-to-market and culture marketing and communications activities
• Built and led the department responsible for field marketing, product marketing, growth marketing, communications, creative, and events
• Established marketing infrastructure, including marketing automation platform, and core paid, earned, shared, and owned channels
• Defined and continually evolved marketing department priorities, org chart, processes, and tools to reflect the changing needs of a hypergrowth company

Chief Marketing Officer

• Helped drive Klick's double-digit annual growth through the relentless pursuit of best-in-class digital innovation, automation, and effectiveness to solve clients' healthcare business challenges
• Responsible for strategic leadership of business group comprising a global healthcare portfolio of more than 10 brands and enterprise engagements across the US, Canada, and Europe
• Co-led team of more than 100 healthcare marketers and technologists, and directly led strategy team of 11

SVP Strategy

• Provided strategic oversight for portfolio of accounts comprising more than 10 pharmaceutical brands
• Led cross-brand strategic engagements to help clients develop platforms, products, people, and processes that elevate organizational digital excellence 
• Developed partnerships, methodologies, and tools to drive and quantify business impact of marketing tactics, evaluate return on investment, benchmark success, predict future performance, and optimize accordingly
• Led digital strategy for US launch of novel biologic for inflammatory bowel disease, and contributed to global digital strategy
• Led digital strategy for US launch of novel antidepressant
• Drove organic business growth and new business development through thought-leadership and articulate presentation of measurably effective solutions to clients' business challenges

VP Strategy

• Led digital strategy for US marketing of multi-indication gastrointestinal pharmaceutical brand, including promotion for new indication
• Converted deep understanding of brands’ market dynamics, stakeholders and objectives into digital strategic imperatives and digital tactical plans
• Participated in the development of brand positioning, messaging and segmentation

Digital Strategist

Right Spot Media

(Right Spot Media is a global advertising network that acquired the interactive marketing agency I founded, Commune Media.)

• Engineered acquisition of founded agency, Commune Media
• Led strategy for agency business within ad network serving over two billion global monthly impressions 
• Planned and drove success of products including a publishing platform, custom publications and communities, and lead generation programs

VP Digital Strategy

Commune Media

• Founded digital marketing company focused on digital lead generation and content marketing primarily for energy, healthcare, education and publishing clients
• Secured over 20 corporate clients including Enbridge Gas Distribution, Rogers Communications, Cottage Life and Bullfrog Power
• Consulted in capacity of Director of Marketing for workplace health startup INTERxVENT Canada, subsequently acquired by Gamma-Dynacare Medical Laboratories
• Provided technical direction for customer engagements

Founder and Chief Strategist

Centennial College

• Instructed students part-time in interactive digital media
• Focused on interactive writing and digital content for both advertising and publishing, with an emphasis on practical, effective strategies and tactics

Instructor, School of Communications, Media and Design

Betterhumans

• Founded digital publication focused on emerging science, technology and health topics
• Developed and led implementation of editorial, technology and revenue generation strategy
• Architected and developed content management system
• Earned award for top biotechnology website from Biomat.net (The Biomaterials Network) in 2004
• Engineered acquisition by Betterhumans LLC in 2008

Founder and Editor in Chief

Elsevier Interactive Solutions

• Provided creative direction for interactive and integrated campaigns to meet client business objectives
• Led creative strategy for global test launch of over-the-counter acne treatment in Canada 
• Led content strategy for contextual health advertising product in partnership with Sympatico / MSN
• Brands spanned diabetes, reproductive health, central nervous system, aesthetic medicine and related therapeutic categories for major pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer, Daiichi Sankyo, Ferring, Galderma, Janssen-Ortho, Eli Lilly, Linde Gas Therapeutics, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, Medicis, Merck-Serono, Novartis, Organon, Procter & Gamble, Pfizer, Sanofi-Aventis and Wyeth

Associate Creative Director

• Provided leadership to Content team within creative department
• Developed and oversaw implementation of content strategies that met healthcare client objectives and Elsevier digital content utilization goals
• Managed internal and external resources and developed content partnerships, relationships and business opportunities

Content Lead

(Elsevier Interactive Solutions was an interactive agency within Elsevier, one of the world's largest scientific publishers.)

• Developed and implemented content solutions to address clients' business challenges
• Wrote and edited copy for digital marketing initiatives

Content Manager

CareClinix

• Planned and managed editorial projects, including daily news, feature articles and multimedia health reference content
• Oversaw research and writing teams
• Contributed to development of proprietary content management technology

News and Features Editor

(CareClinix was a platform to connect alternative health providers with patients, incubated at Brightspark; it was acquired by supplement manufacturer Metagenics.)

• Wrote and edited health news, feature and reference articles
• Developed editorial direction, style guides, policies and procedures

Content Editor

As EVP Generative AI at Klick, I work to unleash generative AI’s revolutionary potential for health. With over 20 years at the nexus of life science strategy and technology, I've directed award-winning digital strategy for drug launches, led marketing for a successful biomedical AI startup, and spearheaded using large language models in pharmaceutical R&D. Now, I conceptualize, facilitate, and evangelize generative AI innovation in healthcare. If you're an innovator in this area, let’s connect.

I wouldn't have believed this, but if you train a fairly simple transformer on lots of disease history, it can predict disease progression.

Researchers took the GPT-2 architecture, tweaked it a bit, used ICD-10 diseases as tokens instead of word fragments, trained it on 400,000 UK Biobank patients, and predicted disease progression with good accuracy.

They can also predict death: "Among the most confidently predicted next events is death, with an age-stratified AUC of 0.97 in both sexes."

The time horizon of predictions is also quite good, with reasonable accuracy out to 10 years.

And they used a tiny model with about 2 million parameters, whereas the smallest language models with useful capabilities tend to be at least a few BILLION parameters.

Really interesting research and probably replicable and extendible by many people as long as you have the data.

Simon Smith

GPT-5 is just over a month old, and OpenAI has released an even better coding version in part to accelerate its own work.

Among other things, the new GPT-5 Codex model:

- Thinks longer when needed (can run hours), faster when not
- Is much better at refactoring and code reviews 
- Can visually inspect its output for things like improving user interfaces

Coding is extremely competitive right now, and OpenAI is aggressively trying to beat out Anthropic in particular.

But there's also this interesting line in the announcement release: "At OpenAI, Codex now reviews the vast majority of our PRs, catching hundreds of issues every day—often before a human review begins. It’s been key to letting the Codex team move fast with greater confidence."

OpenAI is building the machine that builds the machine. Each improvement to the Codex models and scaffolding helps them move even faster.

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