The Philadelphia VFP User Group will meet this Wednesday, August 15 at Valley Forge Pension Management, 715 Twining Road, Suite 202, Dresher, PA 19025. (Note: The Oreland offramp from PA 309 Southbound has been permanently closed. The easiest way to reach the meeting location from the PA Turnpike or 309 Southbound is to come through the Fort Washington Industrial Park.)

Feel free to bring something to eat and arrive as early as 6:30.

Speaker: Jim Walsh

I was born and raised in Philadelphia. I have a BS, Physics from St. Joseph's College (Phila), MS, Physics from Brown Univ (Providence, RI), and a Ph D in Physiology & Biophysics from Univ of Vermont (Burlington, VT). I did a post-doctoral fellowship in neuroscience at the Univ of Pennsylvania.

After my MS degree, I worked for a couple of years with IBM in semiconductor technology development in Vermont.

I was an Assistant Professor at Beaver College in Glenside, PA for several years teaching Anatomy & Physiology, and Computer Science.

While teaching, I was doing computer consulting on the side. I finally decided that computer consulting was more fun, and gave up teaching entirely.

The general theme of my career has been the use of computers in science, engineering, and medicine. I've had an opportunity to work in a lot of different fields (the advantages of being a Physics major). In college I worked for a year in a work-study program at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center. That is where I first learned to program. We were using computers to simulate proposed launches to determine the best parameters for getting successful orbits.

My master's thesis was a magnetic resonance study of the structure of glass. Part of that involved using computers to simulate the measured spectra.

At IBM, I was involved in characterizing semiconductor processing techniques that were coming out of the development labs. Part of that involved computer simulations of the experimental measurements.

At the Univ of Vermont, I did research that involved electrical recordings from single brain cells. I used a DEC PDP-8 computer to completely control the experiments, and also computer simulation to model the results.

My consulting work as been in the area of medical applications, mostly in the field of Biomechanics and Podiatry. I am also part-inventor of a system for measuring human gait: GaitMat II.


Topic: Medical Computer Consulting - Looking at the world of medicine from the computer consultants point of view. This includes analyzing and integrating data in a variety of forms and using automation to help provide a comprehensive patient information.