Q: What do you see when you look straight on at a shower head?A: Usually, a LOT of small holes.Until now! Starting in 2009, High Sierra Showerheads completely rethought this everyday product, bringing its design into the 21st Century. After being vastly impressed as a customer, I've worked part-time with them to acquire customers, allies, and partners.Their shower heads feature a patented nozzle based on agricultural and golf course irrigation tech. It splits water into two streams via a pin, then collides them. This sends a drenching, rainlike spray of large, heavy droplets tumbling out a single opening. It's immensely satisfying, yet uses as little as 1.25 or 1.5 gallons per minute (gpm), saving you up to 50% on water and energy. This design also stays clog-free, even with hard water.In reviews, customers nearly always prefer High Sierra's spray to the conventional design's. High Sierra's shower heads have been Best Picks on 14 major websites, including CNET, CNN Underscored, Wirecutter (a New York Times Company), and Popular Science. Institutions such as Ohio State, Purdue, Yale, Penn State, the US Air Force Academy, Fort Liberty, and Planet Fitness (at 200+ locations to date), have chosen High Sierra's products over those from far better-known competitors.The savings on energy and water utility bills that the company's most popular 1.5 gpm models deliver can pay back their entire cost within 3-6 months in a typical household, and give ongoing savings thereafter. That's a stunning ROI for any investment. Their ecological benefits are stellar, too.While working with them, High Sierra's unit sales tripled from 2014 to 2016. Am now seeking to help them ramp up this growth and establish this company's showerheads as a highly recognized brand, competing against 50- and 100-year-old firms whose budgets for advertising and marketing are vastly larger. It's a tall order! I started out with little experience in this realm, yet a keen eagerness to learn.

Alongside my long-time work consulting with High Sierra Showerheads, I'm also consulting part time with the entrepreneur at Western Ecology, LLC, assisting them with marketing, website redesign, social media presence, and business development, focused on growing their manufacturing-related sales.They're an environmental consultant and contractor with a focus on land and watershed restoration.Their company also designs, manufactures, and sells modern versions of the Dixon Land Imprinter (DLI), a tractor-pulled roller device. This device makes funnel-shaped indentations into which it reseeds native grasses, creating an ideal environment for seedling growth by naturally collecting rainwater and mulch. That, in turn, can help restore robust ecosystems on damaged lands, increase water infiltration, prevent soil erosion, and even sequester carbon.

Over a span of three decades at UC Berkeley, I served in a variety of information technology (IT) roles, working in Programmer/Analyst and Application Programmer positions in units within two central IT organizations, Information Services & Technology (IST) and Office of the CIO (OCIO).From 2014-on, I was part of the newly-formed Research IT unit, supporting the university's world-class researchers: faculty, postdocs, grad students, undergrads, visitors, and others. This unit operates much like an agile internal startup, working extensively with campus partners and customers to design and initiate or catalyze new services, and often also to deliver, co-deliver, or coordinate them.We pioneered the Berkeley Research Computing (BRC) program, beginning with a campus-wide condo/institutional cluster for High Performance Computing (HPC), in partnership with a team at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. We then added Cloud Computing support, Analytics Environments on Demand (AEoD), and Consulting programs. We also helped launch and run a campus Research Data Management (RDM) program. My role in BRC blended end user consulting, tech support, tech writing, and marketing, primarily in support of the HPC program and its Savio computing cluster.Research IT also supports programs in Digital Humanities, Museum Informatics, and several other areas, most of which had been ongoing and were gathered into the department's portfolio.In Museum Informatics, starting in 2009, I was a software developer and documentation specialist, contributing to and helping maintain CollectionSpace, a web-based, open source collections management and information system for museums and other collecting organizations. Institutions at UC Berkeley and worldwide use it to manage cataloging, acquisitions, loans, and many other activities. We transitioned this product to LYRASIS, its current organizational home, which is working to make it available in a hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) offering.

Between my undergraduate and graduate studies, I worked in the Natural Sciences Business Office and the Natural Sciences Dean's Office, processing travel and other reimbursements for researchers working under contacts and grants; helping out, during the maternity leave of the Dean's secretary, in general office and reception roles in the Dean's Office; and eventually maintaining and reconciling general ledgers for several departments within the Division of Natural Sciences.