About

I spent fifteen years working toward a career in orthopaedic surgery. Then, after the years of sacrifice finally paid off and the opportunity arrived, I turned it down and chose to walk away. To understand why, you have to start on a cattle farm in rural Ohio.

The farm made work immediate and practical. There were cattle to feed, crops and fence lines to tend, equipment to keep running, timber to work, weather to respect, and neighbors who showed up for each other when something broke or someone needed help. I learned early that care was usually concrete: notice what needs attention, understand the materials, use the tools in front of you, and stay until it is done. That became my first definition of being useful.

For as long as I can remember, what I wanted was to be a source of good in the world: to help the people who need it and be a reason for hope. Growing up around my mom's work as a nurse practitioner gave that impulse a direction. Medicine looked like a place where practical skill and love for people could meet: a way to move toward suffering with something real in your hands.

Between the farm and college, I spent two years as a missionary in South Korea. I walked the streets of Seoul, learned enough Korean to teach and listen, and tried to be useful in a place that was new to me. It was about as far from that farm as I could get. It deepened a sense of duty I already felt, the desire to be a source of good in the world, and it taught me to adapt quickly to unfamiliar ideas, people, and environments. It also widened my sense of who I was responsible to. That set a pattern I never really broke.

I came back and walked on to the rugby team at Brigham Young University: no scholarship, no recruiting, just earning a spot. We won a national championship while I was there. Rugby turned force, structure, trust, and timing into something a team had to feel together. It made sense to me in the same way farm work had made sense. By the time I was thinking seriously about medicine, I was already drawn to work that joined physical skill, judgment under pressure, teamwork, and repair.

After college I started medical school, and orthopaedic surgery felt like the natural place for all of that to land. It was medicine with mechanics exposed: structure, load, alignment, motion, repair; bones, joints, muscles, tendons, hardware, imaging, teams in an operating room. The work asked a question I had been asking since childhood: what is broken, what forces caused it, and how do we put it back together?

A few years in, when I was as broke as most medical students are, a pet of mine needed life-saving surgery I couldn't afford. I wasn't going to let the bill decide whether I lost an animal I loved, so I put the surgery on a credit card and started a hardwood-furniture business to pay it off. The building came easy because I'd spent my life doing manual labor, on the farm and in timber-frame construction, handy with tools long before I had a shop of my own. After several months and a lot of black walnut, the one-man garage operation had become an industrial-grade workshop: power tools, jigs, dust collection, process, precision. When something important was out of reach, I built what I needed to reach it.

Those same years, I spent two summers treating patients and assisting in surgeries in the Kingdom of Eswatini and the Himalayas. The work did not leave me thinking about access as an abstraction. It left me thinking about particular people: patients who needed skill, tools, and cures no less than anyone in Boston or San Francisco, but who happened to live far from the systems where medicine concentrates its most advanced tools. I still wanted to treat patients like that. I just began to doubt that becoming one more surgeon, however dedicated, was the way to reach enough of them.

Late in medical school, a research project handed me a repetitive task: assigning metrics to x-rays, again and again, across thousands of images. I remember thinking that the repetition itself was telling me something. If a trained person could look at image after image and make the same kind of measurement, there had to be a better way to build the tool around the task. That question led me to computer vision, and the first machine-learning model I built was for those x-rays.

It started as efficiency, but it quickly became something deeper. I had spent years learning how to fix bodies with instruments and hardware, and suddenly I was staring at a different class of tool: one that could learn from medical data, repeat careful work, and scale beyond the room I was standing in. That curiosity shaped my research year decision. I took a clinical-AI position at Harvard Medical School and taught myself to code well enough to keep up with the engineers around me.

About six months into that year, ChatGPT launched. What had been a natural curiosity I was already pursuing suddenly felt consequential at the level of society. I began to understand that AI was changing the time horizon. The honest question was not only what it could do then, but what might become possible over the same thirty years that would have been my orthopaedic surgery career.

Even then, I was still applying to orthopaedic surgery residency and interviewing. Surgery was not a backup plan; it was the path I had built my life around. The question became whether to stay on the road I knew, or step into uncertainty for the chance to work on problems at a scale surgery never could. A scalpel only reaches the patient on the table. Technology and invention could create solutions that reach people wherever they are.

So when the Match came, I chose not to submit my name. I went to Carnegie Mellon to become technical enough to build what I believed medicine would need.

I took the long way in on purpose. The thing I wanted to do was not a standard training lane inside medicine. Physician-computer scientist is still too new to have a clean apprenticeship, and there are not many job postings for "doctor who codes." If I was serious about using AI to solve disease at scale, I could not remain only a medical person advising technical people. I needed to become technical myself.

That meant becoming a founder, not just changing specialties. The best founders can reason from the substrate of what they are building. For Galen, that substrate is biology, computation, and AI. Carnegie Mellon was not a detour from medicine; it was the apprenticeship I needed to become a technical founder. I went there to learn computing from first principles, deep enough to build the systems medicine does not have yet, not just apply the ones it does.

Along the way I published some theoretical physics too, mostly out of curiosity: a different field, but the same instinct to understand how things work all the way down. Looking back, the things that had seemed like detours from medicine were never detours at all. The farm, the operating room, the workshop, the x-rays, the models, the physics: all of them were teaching me to move between atoms and information.

Now I'm in San Francisco building Galen, the virtual-cell company: a problem at the intersection of physics, computing, and medicine, and the place my path had been pointing for longer than I knew. Farm work taught me that the physical world can be understood through contact. Orthopaedics taught me to see the body as structure, force, failure, and repair. The patients I met far from advanced medical systems taught me that cures should not depend on proximity. Machine learning taught me that some of the most powerful tools in medicine will be models. Galen is where those instincts converge: building virtual-cell models for deciding what biological change to pursue next, making cellular behavior legible, grounding computation in experiment, and turning understanding into deliberate biological change.

It's my answer to the faces I could not forget in Eswatini and the Himalayas: a way to reach beyond the patient in front of me without forgetting why the patient mattered in the first place. It will take years, and it is far from finished. But it is the truest version I have found of what I wanted from the start: to be a force for good in the world, and to do as much of it as a single life can. That is why I left the safe, respected path. This one feels more worth the risk.