When I was eleven, two of my sister's friendships fell apart, and I appointed myself the peacemaker. It worked — they made up, and I discovered the feeling I've been chasing ever since: the deep, quiet satisfaction of helping people fix what's broken. Decades later, that's still the engine that drives me. If I can help folks avoid the mistakes I've made — or seen others make — that makes my day.

I became a pharmacist because the human body is the most beautiful system there is, and I've always seen the world in systems. After my residency at Duke University Medical Center, I spent eight years in the U.S. Army, going from private first class to officer candidate school to Army aviator and maintenance test pilot. Test pilots learn a truth that never left me: in a complex system, "close enough" is a lie. Lives ride on the discipline of finding what's wrong before it finds you.

In 1995 I found the field where all of it — pharmacy, systems, discipline — snapped together: clinical supplies. I ran investigational materials at Otsuka, led clinical supplies at McNeil, became Head of US Operations for Johnson & Johnson's global clinical supplies unit, and then president and global COO of a 100-person clinical supplies contract organization. And across all those years I kept seeing the same heartbreaking thing: brilliant molecules — many of them invaluable cures — crawling toward patients behind inefficient supply chains nobody had ever really looked at end to end.

So in 2007, I founded Global BioPharm Solutions to do the looking. One mission, still unchanged: get molecules to market faster by improving the speed, quality, and efficiency of the clinical supply chain. Because supply chains aren't really about boxes and labels and temperature loggers. At the end of every one of them is a patient — someone's mother, someone's son — waiting for the therapy your science is in the process of proving.

The other thing I never stopped doing is teaching. I've trained this industry's people for nearly thirty years — courses, bootcamps, master classes, and two forums I host myself, CRISP and NECSO, where clinical supply professionals on both coasts learn from each other the way I wish I could have when I started. I've served the Global Clinical Supplies Group since my first meeting in 1996 — on its board since 1998, as its chairman for a decade — because I believe industry knowledge should be shared with as many people as possible before the knowledge is lost.

I'm still a pharmacist. Still a systems guy. Still, honestly, that eleven-year-old who can't leave broken things alone.

If something in your supply chain is broken — or you just can't shake the feeling that it might be — let's talk. Helping you fix it will make both our days.