Michael Barnathan

About Michael

I'm very active in medicine and education. To put the reasoning succinctly:

"Education and medicine are my purposes because they are the two foundations for the attainment of human potential. The instrument of that potential is the living, thinking human mind."

My greatest endeavor is "Project Polymath", a new type of school which trains thousands of renaissance people to go forth and improve the world with their own unique visions. We've recently acquired a campus and are going full steam ahead toward investment, accreditation, and ultimately establishment of a new university - and a new paradigm of education.

More generally about me:

I'm the "social entrepreneur" type, and identify most strongly with worldchanging visions and passions, particularly in education and medicine.

Unfortunately, as an employee, I'm valued only as a developer, with no opportunity to improve the world in any meaningful way. My own proficiency at software engineering hurts me here - everyone wants me to work for them, but no one wants me as an equal. I strategize well, have a great many ideas, and can motivate people strongly around an ideal, but I can't soar at 10,000 feet with a rock chaining me to the ground - which is the closest analogy I have to that type of employment.

That's not to say that I don't want to code. I'm extraordinarily skilled at it; it would be a waste not to. But I want the coding to change people's lives in some way.

You can find my LinkedIn profile here:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelbarnathan

And my resume here:
http://michael.barnathan.name/resume.pdf

I taught CS for a year and routinely go school-to-school speaking to the teachers about better models of high school education. I mentor a sizable number of students and advise a few startups. I'm *really* passionate about both teaching and learning.

Outside of computer science, I also have proficiency in bioinformatics, radiology, electronics, musical composition, piano, semiprofessional photography, and most forms of writing. I am a very seasoned speaker and devastatingly competent verbal presenter of both persuasive and informative material.

Evidence of technical skill and educational/medical vision!

http://www.livingdiscoveries.com - that one diagnoses breast cancer automatically.
http://www.projectpolymath.org - that's a new school I'm trying to start.
http://www.biomotionsuite.com - Parkinson's disease diagnosis and monitoring. Nominally Director of Machine Learning, but built ALL of the medical technology.
http://www.njdelay.com - Using cacti to graph latencies... of trains.
http://www.ethereallamentations.com - music.
http://michael.barnathan.name - Personal homepage.
http://www.metasquared.com - Game I made at 12.

I also run the dedicated server on which all of these websites (and email, DNS, mysql, etc.) reside. I set it up from scratch and administer it day-to-day. It runs Gentoo Linux, which turned out to be a great design choice for a server.

http://www.behance.net/gallery/Nature-and-Wildlife-Photography/4074841 (click "buy this" on a photo for the photo ordering system I built out on top of my Behance profile - you don't have to actually buy anything to see it at work).