J A C K E M E R Y . C O M

My background and training is in law and bioengineering, with a strong computational emphasis. I began life as an aerospace engineer at Pratt & Whitney's research facility in Florida, where I developed a computational model of turbine blade vibrations, and found out what happens to engineers when aerospace companies lose contracts. After a short skirmish with my draft board and a brief detour through the U.S. Marine Corps, I decided that law school offered a better likelihood of a stable career.

I practiced law (mainly commercial and securities litigation) full time for about 15 years, initially with a mid-sized firm, and later as a solo practitioner. For ten of those years, I spent most of my time managing, under direction by three participating law firms, class action litigation involving multiple lawsuits arising from a failed thrift, which eventually ended in a (then) Arizona record $14 million settlement. In the course of that litigation, I designed and implemented the first complex litigation support database used in Arizona. I also managed the distribution of the settlement to the approximately 20,000 class members. The rest of my practice was devoted primarily to representing various business clients in litigation, usually involving financial transactions, real estate, intellectual property, and contract disputes.

Eventually, I found that I missed my engineering 'roots'. I also became involved in some medical malpractice litigation matters, and decided to take a class at Arizona State University so as to try to improve my level of understanding of the medical issues. The class I chose was a general graduate level introduction to bioengineering, a subject by which I was immediately fascinated. I eventually scaled back my law practice in order to work part time on a master's degree in bioengineering. My thesis research involved writing a computational model to reconstruct signals in the interior of a nerve trunk from recordings taken around the exterior -- conceptually similar to trying to detect individual telephone conversations from signals picked up around the outside of a cable containing many telephone lines operating at once. I also spent some time studying for and passing the patent bar exam.

Shortly thereafter, the opportunity arose to teach computer programming at a community college located in a smaller town in the mountains of southeastern Arizona (Cochise College). That meshed nicely with the educational needs of my then 15 year old son, who immediately bailed out of high school, took the GED, and signed up at the community college; and of my wife, who wanted to attend the college's nursing school.

I then spent a very pleasant six year interlude as a college professor, which also gave me the opportunity to complete the 18 graduate credits in computer science required for teaching accreditation, and to attend some AI-related conferences in the summers. During this time I also completed and published a textbook on civil procedure law.

Then, my wife and son having finished and become impatient to move on, I 'retired' from professoring to work on acquiring a really thorough background in bioscience. After a semester in Tucson at University of Arizona filling in some gaps, I entered a PhD program in bioengineering at Arizona State University, where I worked on computational molecular modeling of peptide interactions. (Why would a middle-aged litigator / college professor want to work on a PhD in bioengineering, instead of, say, practicing law for money? Short explanation: I can't help it -- I'm a science geek, it's the sort of thing we do. Longer-winded explanation here).

While in the PhD program, the opportunity arose to take a full-time position with the research center of a world-class immunologist and inventor, Dr. Stephen Albert Johnston, as an "embedded" patent lawyer, the idea being to proactively identify and file on patentable ideas coming out of the lab's research. My work in that lab eventually led back into what became my dissertation research, which I completed in 2010.

My eventual goal is very simple: to be as completely plugged in to the bleeding edge of scientific progress as I can be. When I began working on the PhD, I assumed that I would wind up either in academics or in biotech patent law. Academics has the benefit of allowing hands-on research, together with the intellectual stimulation of teaching, which I enjoy, but also seems often to lead to a very narrow focus, and to spending inordinate time and energy satisfying the bureaucratic demands of funding agencies. Patent law potentially facilitates exposure to a broader range of technologies, and pays considerably better, but the law firm environment leaves little time or energy for other pursuits. The solution, at least for me, is: do patent law, but independently, and limited to research-related patenting, and continue with my own research, also independently. The hope is that by eliminating the extraneous distractions and high overhead, I can do a better job at both. To that end, I have also engineered my operation to be much more mobile and "small footprint", so that I can live and work in places that are maximally conducive to creativity and healthy living -- for me, that means away from big cities and near an ocean. Stay tuned.