Alan Herman:  

Life Since graduation and college, I have had a great many diverse number of jobs (from forest firefighter to commercial fisherman but after some of these sabatical jobs I had settled mainly into validation engineering for pharmaceutical and medical device companies. While I have worked in commercial (IBM, Unisys, EDS, etc.), military (Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard) and government (FTC,FDIC,HUD,DOJ,NIH, etc.) sectors, and have positions ranging from programming to project management, from mainframe to the Internet and client-server, the pharmaceutical regulatory compliance area was where I felt passion to make a difference. These companies take shortcuts in quality and I am there to say "No you don't! This started in 1999 when I was hired as a consultant for the FDA as a compliance auditor for Y2K and compliance with electronic records. The US government had been sent me to many great places in US and Europe (including Amsterdam...so befitting and ironic..don't ya think?), Ireland, UK, Germany, etc. This experience broke me away from the Internet based work (which had peaked and was going down hill by this time) into the world of pharmaceutical compliance and validation engineering. I have worked as a Sr. Validation Engineer for pharma and biomed companies like Eli Lilly (Indianapolis, IN), Elanco (Terra Haute, IN), Roche Diagnostics, MedImmune (Frederick, MD), Johnson & Johnson (Miami Lakes, FL) and now work in interventional cardiology companies as a quality reviewer. After working at Cordis in Florida, I had worked at Boston Scientific in a town 20 miles NW of the Twin Cities, in Maple Grove, Minnesota. I loved it up there, mainly because the Northwood and Canadian backcountry wilderness areas are so accessible. That ended however, and had worked for further consulting in Mass, NC, and remotely for a company in NH.. It had been a very big struggle in 2011, with the economy (don't need to say much there) and so took a job with the Baltimore Orioles on the Ground Crew/Tarp team during Spring Training. I loved talking with my favorite players from other teams and the Nationals came through a few times. I still and always will be, foremost, a Chicago Cubs fan however. Corey Patterson had surprised me as he was with the Nationals and I knew him from the Cubs. He asked me if I had deserted the Cubs for the O's and I asked HIM the same question with him playing for ...Expand for more