My Story
Cold Lake
In the summer of 1986, I attended the Royal Canadian Air Cadet Senior Leaders Course (SLC) at CFB Cold Lake, Alberta. SLC participants came from all over the country. My bunkmate, who won the award for best cadet (and got a ride on a CF-18 as reward!), was from British Columbia. The gruelling six-week course kept us focused daily from 6am to 10pm on drill, leadership training, instructional techniques, citizenship and civics, and physical fitness. Returning to my home squadron (101 Moncton) at the end of the summer, I was promoted to warrant officer (WO2) where I served as an instructor and mentor for approximately 90-100 air cadets. I'd joined the air cadets because my friend was joining and because I wanted to become a pilot. Instead, my friend quit soon after and I graduated as a leader four years later, with a skill set that has served me well to this day.
Freddy Beach
I spent two summers working in a small research group at UNB in Fredericton, while I was an undergrad student there. The group was developing the first numerical simulation of the CANDU nuclear power plant. As this involved solving coupled differential equations for neutron transport, heat transfer, and fluid dynamics using numerical methods, the Fortran codebase was enormous compared to the BASIC programming I'd done before as a young hobbyist. I spent an unforgettable month the first summer 'breaking' different coolant pipes in the reactor and meticulously recording what would happen to key variables like reactor core temperature. I couldn't believe they were paying me to do this! Rising to the challenge of scientific programming paid off in ways I hadn't expected at the time, as it led to contract work for other research groups that needed numerical simulations for other applications.
Ground Truth
One of the scientists who had hired me to program numerical simulations was Jim Drummond, then a physics professor at the University of Toronto. After I finished a contract for Jim that had me programming and testing numerical simulations of atmospheric radiation in Fortran for a year and a half, I switched gears and enrolled in grad school under his supervision. Jim was the principal investigator of an international team of scientists designing a satellite instrument called MOPITT (Measurements of Pollution In The Troposphere). For my MSc thesis, I designed, built, and tested a low-cost near-infrared solar simulator that would become one of three radiometric targets used to validate the MOPITT instrument before launch in 1999. MOPITT went on to become the longest operating space mission in Canadian history until it was finally deactivated in 2025.
Laser Focus
As MOPITT was delivered to our industrial partners for integration with the NASA spacecraft, I switched gears once again and proposed to undertake an infrared laser-based research project to make controlled laboratory measurements of the water vapour continuum. The continuum is a significant factor in Earth's climate, but it was poorly understood due to the daunting technical challenges of making accurate measurements of the weak, featureless absorption. The mid-infrared cavity ringdown experiment I developed at the University of Toronto, and later improved at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) as a postdoctoral researcher, led to the first accurate low-temperature measurements of the water vapour continuum, data which offered a revealing glimpse into the role of water dimers. While still at NIST, I also discovered that the apparatus I had built for water vapour continuum measurements could also handily measure parts-per-billion (ppb) concentrations of trace gases in air.
Just Breathe
I returned to Canada in late 2003 to work for an Edmonton-based company called Synodon, where once again I was gainfully employed programming numerical simulations of atmospheric transmission for a new application: oil and gas pipeline leak detection. The company was headed for an IPO, and the entrepreneurial spirit was infectious. At Synodon, I learned how resource scarcity could unlock clever, creative solutions under the right conditions. Solutions that sometimes worked better than anyone expected. It was in Synodon's lab that I had the epiphany: looking at a tool cart, I recalled my experiment at NIST. It was centered around a 4 x 8 ft. floating optical table onto which were mounted a water-cooled infrared laser and optical chain ending with a liquid-nitrogen cooled detector. Above and below the optical table were equipment racks containing a half-dozen power supplies, various sensors and control systems, vacuum pumps, etc. Could I take all of that, and somehow miniaturize it and shove it inside a small cart that could be used in clinical settings for rapid, quantitative breath analysis? In April 2005, with the enthusiastic support of Adrian Banica, Synodon's founder and CEO, I left his company and founded Picomole Instruments to find out.
VenturePrize
I went on to raise millions of dollars in investments, recruit a team of scientists and engineers, and develop technologies capable of detecting lung cancer from a simple breath sample, but you never would have guessed it from Picomole's first office, an unassuming 220 sq.ft. suite at the Advanced Technology Centre in Edmonton. In those days, Picomole's office furnishings consisted of a wooden desk and bookcase that I had bought used for $140, and a $4 bamboo plant I bought at Ikea for ambiance. I had no lab equipment. All I had at my disposal was my laptop and a tall stack of research articles on breath analysis. There, I focused on the idea that had obsessed me for years and took the next step: I programmed a Matlab simulation of a next-generation version of my old experiment at NIST. The simulation allowed me to accurately predict the performance of the instrument at measuring known breath metabolites at ppb levels. Satisfied at last that my idea would work, I sat down and built a company from scratch, starting with the business plan that would give the company its biggest boost in May 2007, when we won the VenturePrize business plan competition.
Born Again
By 2015, I had taken Picomole (and Valaista Health, a spin-off company I founded to pursue non-medical wellness applications of the breath analysis technology) as far as I could. One way or another, the team of talented scientists and engineers I'd hired solved countless technical problems to build a breath analyzer on a cart that bore an uncanny resemblance to the original vision I set down to paper a decade before. To top it off, we had obtained outstanding results in our first clinical trial, better than anyone dared to hope. But the path of clinical product development is very costly, and I saw no viable path to the tens of millions of dollars that would ultimately be needed. At that point in my life, I was burned out and had nothing left to give. So I wound down Valaista and worked closely with Picomole's board of directors to find a new CEO for that company. For the first time in eight years, I had time to look after myself. I hopped on my bike and went for a ride. I slowly began to depressurize. After years in business suits, poring over pitch decks and financial statements, I realized what I craved most of all was to get back in the lab again. A few months later, batteries recharged, I became the Director of Engineering at Metamaterial Technologies Inc. (MTI), based in Halifax.
Building Again
At MTI, I got to build things again. I built a holography lab from scratch, then designed and built a low-cost 300 sq.ft. class 10,000 clean room on a shoestring budget. A HVAC engineer who visited the clean room was so impressed by my design he offered me a job on the spot. I recruited a gender-balanced team of talented young engineers following a set of startup hiring principles I put to paper during my post-Picomole downtime. With my encouragement, they gained the confidence to improvise with ease, for example making the scanning mechanism for the first large area hologram we ever made using parts from a discarded printer they found in a recycling bin. Together my team and I went on to demonstrate holographic notch filters at multiple wavelengths, and patented the world's first highly-transparent, wide-angle laser protection filter for aerospace applications.
Waterloo Calling
My successes at MTI came to the attention of Thalmic Labs in Waterloo, who recruited me into the role of R&D Community Lead and Holography Project Lead, and tasked me with building an advanced research laboratory for holography from the ground up. This time, the application was smartglasses. I soon found myself on a global talent search as I applied my hiring principles and recruited a gender-balanced team of exceptional junior scientists and engineers, and even added a talented holographic artist to the mix. In an early test of our problem-solving skills, my team and I solved a major technical challenge that was thought to be impossible, eliminating a key obstacle to mass production of holographic displays. Through curiosity-driven research, we also identified a potential solution to a second problem that our manufacturing partner had been struggling to solve. I really enjoyed working at Thalmic and especially the camaraderie of the holography team. But my family needed me in New Brunswick, and so I returned home in late 2018 and began to look for a new challenge.
Giving Back
I'd been mentoring entrepreneurs since winning VenturePrize in 2007, but I wanted to do more. I joined the NBIF team in 2019 and managed two funds, the Talent Recruitment Fund and a new fund that I designed and launched called the Lab-to-Market Fund, which was intended to help bridge the gap between academic funding and early stage investments. From my office in Moncton, I travelled all over the province, from St. Andrews to Shippagan, from Edmundston to Sackville, meeting researchers and innovators in their offices and labs. As an experimental scientist, I intuitively understood the triumph of their advances as well as the frustration of their challenges. I left the NBIF with a renewed sense of purpose, shaped by the experience of having met so many dedicated researchers and visionary innovators. Today, my personal mission remains the same: to leverage all of my experience and energy to help innovators and entrepreneurs achieve their dreams, right here in Atlantic Canada.