Speaker 0 | 00:09.528
Hi nerds, I’m Michael Moore hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m here with Michael Fauché, Director of Information Technology for Columbia Center for Translational Immunology. Welcome to the program, Michael. Did I say all that correctly, by the way?
Speaker 1 | 00:22.780
You did. You did. That was a mouthful. Thank you. It’s good to be here.
Speaker 0 | 00:26.356
I thought I was going to fumble it up, so I’m actually pretty excited I got it right. Before we jump into our icebreaker segment, we usually do, I just want to take a second to ask the question, what is translational immunology?
Speaker 1 | 00:41.488
That’s a good question. That’s what I get asked most times because the title of the center itself is a mouthful, as I said. So translational immunology is a means by which multiple disciplines. come together to try to find common solutions to myriad immunological problems. So let’s say that we find a specific research, a specific experiment that starts to show effectiveness in, say, cancer research or cancer cells. Someone that studies diabetes or influenza may see that study and say, you know what? That’s really interesting. And I think I can apply that to my specialty. here so you can think of the center for translational immunology with our principal investigators or as i’ll refer to them as pis um are kind of like vice presidents of a giant corporation everybody has their specialty right maybe it’s manufacturing or it’s you know machine work or it’s it whatever we have specialists in influenza cancer cells um organ transplants that’s a big thing for us so everybody kind of combines resources and you forces and knowledge to try to find solutions to all these sorts of immunology.
Speaker 0 | 02:02.480
That’s great.
Speaker 1 | 02:04.921
To translate items from the lab bench to the clinical spot.
Speaker 0 | 02:11.125
Oh, that’s fantastic. We’re going to pick back up on the other side of this icebreaker segment and talk more about translational immunology and how it relates to IT. But… it is now time for our icebreaker segment. We call this random access memories. I ask a question and then you respond, whatever comes to your head first. Right. And your first question is you’re in a meeting and the CEO announces that they have a new company app and they look to you and they say, Hey, what do you name it?
Speaker 1 | 02:47.659
Man, you know, I had this problem. In graduate school, my capstone project was naming an application I came up with. And
Speaker 0 | 03:00.000
I had a hard time.
Speaker 1 | 03:00.940
I tried to be clever with it. I would call it, oh, man. Nope, that’s already been used. I was thinking Crown because the Columbia app is Crown.
Speaker 0 | 03:11.429
Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 03:11.770
that’s a good one. Yeah. How about… Feezel.
Speaker 0 | 03:21.672
What is it?
Speaker 1 | 03:22.653
Feezel. F-E-E-Z-L-E.
Speaker 0 | 03:25.095
I like it. You know why I like it? I don’t know what that means. And it sounds really good and it’s fun to say. So that’s why I like it.
Speaker 1 | 03:34.580
Yeah. You always need something with some sort of fun hook to it, right? So did you Feezel yesterday? Did you put it in Feezel?
Speaker 0 | 03:42.665
Yeah. Did you Feezel?
Speaker 1 | 03:43.546
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 03:45.427
Can you Feezel that for me? that’s no i actually think you got some after this podcast uh after we get done recording this podcast you better just go run and get that feasible name because somebody’s gonna come out underneath you right yeah that’s a good one yeah i had a hard like i said with my capstone project i had the hardest time trying to come up with something clever that
Speaker 1 | 04:07.096
uh you know combined the two functionalities it did so no i think i think you did that one right all right so here’s the next one
Speaker 0 | 04:15.800
Standing desk or sitting desk?
Speaker 1 | 04:18.802
Oh, sitting.
Speaker 0 | 04:19.902
Sitting. You know, I had a standing desk when I was younger. And as I get older, I just enjoy the chair.
Speaker 1 | 04:28.808
I do too. I see you have a nice chair there. And I thought, you know, I need a new one in my lab. And I was thinking, what can I get that’s covered by the university? It’s really comfortable. I did try standing too for a while. And I got fidgety. Yes. And. And I would find myself being pretty productive, but then there are times when I want to sit back and put my feet up on the desk and contemplate just being more relaxed. take my lunch break, put it on my chest and just kind of feel like I might be at home. Definitely sitting.
Speaker 0 | 05:03.507
When I catch myself doing, regardless of anything, I will actually get up to pace if I’m talking or thinking anyway. So it’s like all that pacing, I’m going to come back and sit down.
Speaker 1 | 05:17.431
Right. Yeah. And I find I actually pace and get up when I’m working from home like I am now more than I’m sitting. So I’m actively up and around and doing exactly what the doctors told me to do.
Speaker 0 | 05:27.562
There you go. There you go. What is the funniest error message you have ever seen? I’m sure you’ve seen your fair share of error messages.
Speaker 1 | 05:39.209
I have seen hundreds upon hundreds. You know, there was one. I can’t remember exactly what it said, but it was from a Dell Optiplex GX260 back in the early. What do we call them? The odds? 2000 or so, 99, something like that. And it gave the spurious message that didn’t give you any information other than cannot proceed or something like that. But it wasn’t even like, you know, error message, cannot proceed with the task you’re running. It was simply, I cannot proceed. Okay, or close or something. It was like the two options.
Speaker 0 | 06:19.943
That’s like the 2001 Space Odyssey. How?
Speaker 1 | 06:23.645
thing which was like i i’m sorry i cannot do that dave right yeah now it might have been if i remember correctly it could have been like a specific driver and in fact i think it had something to do with a microscope that we had we were using i was testing it on the device um and it was just one of the most useless sort of error messages i’d ever seen fortunately i could work my way past it and then uh if i remember correctly roll back everything but yeah there was um There was no sense to it whatsoever.
Speaker 0 | 06:55.906
Ominous, too. Just you can’t perceive. I’m not going to tell you with what. Just don’t perceive.
Speaker 1 | 07:01.110
Yeah, I just shut the lights off, close my door, and go home for the day.
Speaker 0 | 07:04.493
We’re done. We’re done. That’s when you shut the laptop on. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
Speaker 1 | 07:11.218
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 0 | 07:12.759
So nice job. Made it through the random access memories. I’m excited to talk about translational immunology. The way you described it, coming together of the minds from many different studies and departments and different pieces, this is exciting stuff. What drove you into this? When I researched you, one of the things I found interesting was that in your earlier days, you had been… well, I don’t know if you had been a journalist, but you at least trained to be a journalist. And then you did it, right?
Speaker 1 | 07:55.150
I did. Yeah, I was a journalist. I went to university to be an English major, and this was up in Massachusetts. And I became a reporter for a local newspaper, and then a bunch of rock magazines around the Northeast and New York, New Jersey. And then some pieces for the Boston Papers, too. And then I remember we would get news over the wire, right? And when originally it came in, it was kind of like a fax machine where you get pages and pages of items. And then it was, I remember specifically we had sort of a DOS box, and I can’t remember the application that was used, but I remember seeing the news that Jerry Garcia had died. And so I think we’re talking 1995 or so, I think that’s when he passed. And for that instant, I saw the writing on the wall and I said, wow, so information like this is going to start coming into news, into newsrooms this way, which means that eventually the news is going to dispel itself out to the masses in a similar fashion. And at that point at the university, I just started off with the internet, you know, the nation sort of, you know. um chat groups and stuff mostly about i was on one skiing i was on one for acdc all these sort of things all sorts of things yeah so i started to um learn graphic design and html and then i had really no direction i decided to go to night school to become a teacher and in the interim i met um a guy who was running a machine shop who brought me in to work nights so i could make some cash punching machine uh We were actually making server racks. I didn’t even know what those were. Making server racks for EMC. And so he said to me, his name was Tom. He said, well, I know you’ve got some writing experience and I need a website. Do you want to? learn html so let me back up a bit i was learning adobe photoshop at school and then he sent me to learn html and so i started learning that and i started putting a website together and subsequently our company was called premier electronics but got purchased by a larger company called um apw and then they brought their own website on suddenly i had no i didn’t have to do a website so he said well listen i need an i.t tech You want to parlay that into that? I said, sure, I’d love to. Because I had taken some programming in fourth grade. I had taken some, you know, basic and some Fortran going way back at the university. Fortran. And I found, yeah, yeah, right. It was great for computational stuff I was doing as an environmental science major. That was a whole other story.
Speaker 0 | 10:49.048
You rarely see the machine languages now. I mean, that’s pretty heavy stuff.
Speaker 1 | 10:53.592
And I remember it making a lot of sense, actually, and I felt really good at it. Of course, we had good instructors. Anyway, long story short, Tom and his network administrator, Doug, basically brought me under their wing and taught me everything there is to know about networking. I mean, we’re talking from Windows NT and early exchange boxes to PBX systems, how to punch telephone lines, how to run Cat5 cables through the wall, and how to… uh you know actually do uh white orange orange white green green white brown brown white blue blue i can’t maybe i got that a little bit off but you know setting up the the coax cables and all that sort of stuff for networking um and i just took it and ran with it um and so there was so during that i had started i was a journalist and then i started to pair that back became a consultant i mean a correspondent uh and then started doing uh pivoted into interviewing bands and interviewing comedians and actors and such. But I really found that I had a knack for the IT world. And so when that company dissolved, I took a job, fortunately enough, at Harvard Medical School and MGH and found myself being an IT support technician for what was then called the Transplantation Biology Research Center, totally by luck. I found my way into this research environment that was invigorating. There was, you know, a lot of discrete needs like there are now for like just like patients have discrete needs. Researchers have discrete, technologically speaking. So it was a challenge to try to find solutions for everybody, but also maintain sort of a, you know, a cogent network. under the Mass General slash Harvard environment.
Speaker 0 | 12:55.066
Well, we have some questions for you, specifically when it comes up to this R&D pieces with this healthcare. And because I know the folks are itching to understand how healthcare R&D ties in with computing. I have had a small stint where I was supporting healthcare R&D. for just a smidgen of time. And I was just literally impressed with how much computational power and storage was needed in that regard. So we’ll talk about that in a minute. I did want to jump back real quick and say one quick thing. If I ever need to have a partner for Grateful Dead trivia, I will make sure that I bring you because you were correct on that date. It was 95. That’s sad. That was like on the money on that one. So good job. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 13:52.967
I appreciate that. I was working on a Saturday morning, and I remember it coming in and flashing it. And I had to call my buddy Fred, who was a deadhead and followed him around for years, break the news to him. Oh,
Speaker 0 | 14:03.917
man. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 | 14:04.597
It was not a good day.
Speaker 0 | 14:07.380
Not a good day.
Speaker 1 | 14:08.460
No, it wasn’t. Well,
Speaker 0 | 14:12.124
I did want to talk about, so you and I both share health care. But. I think that’s where it deviates because most of the healthcare experience that I had, had to deal with patient care. You know, in your case, it’s prior to that. It’s research and development, you know, which I am. I’m always just amazed at this research and development because it takes so much resources and so much pieces. And, and. I want to talk about the earlier resource requirements and then how you’re handling these resource requirements going into this kind of next phase of where we’re headed, which is a lot of this. A lot of our apps, a lot of our pieces have moved to the cloud in some degree. But for organizations that still require a lot of storage and backup and stuff, the options are limited. And it gets really dicey about where you move this data depending on how much computational power it needs, how many reads and access rights and stuff that you need to have to it. So there’s a lot that goes into it. at least from a storage angle, but that’s just one aspect. So if you could walk us through the challenges that you face from a infrastructure design standpoint, network design standpoint in the R&D space, I think that would help at least jumpstart the conversation and let our listeners understand kind of where you’re coming from.
Speaker 1 | 15:58.147
Yeah, absolutely. So. The Center for Translational Immunology is sort of an enviable position, wherein if you’re a principal investigator, let’s say you’re in rheumatology, and you come into the medical center or any sort of medical institution, and you are a team of one, or even if you have a technician, generally you’re vying for grants. You’re trying to get funded somehow, some way. whether that’s through the National Institutes of Health, the NIH, which is where we get most of our funding, or you can get grants from the Army, you can get grants from the Robert Woods Foundation or some sort of foundation. You can come in and you have all these great scientific theories and hypotheses that you need to put to paper, so to speak. you’re relying upon what the university or the institution can provide for you in terms of laptop, Wi-Fi, hardware, networking. So the Center for Translational Immunology, we’re able to pool a lot of our grant money and resources to kind of provide tools that are above and beyond what the university will provide. Now, in terms of the network and the infrastructure, we’re in one of the older buildings on campus. Columbia University is 325, I think, years old. But up at the medical center, our building was built in the mid-60s. So the networking infrastructure, while it had been updated in the late 90s, it’s about to undergo a pretty extensive network upgrade now. Now, that is all incumbent upon the university, which then means that I am reliant upon their work schedule and their funding to be able to provide.
Speaker 0 | 17:51.676
faster network speeds for all my users the same for the wi-fi that’s all incumbent upon the university to do it now with the with the covid yeah sorry to interject here but do you get a say in um in the budget and you know what they should be preparing for the prior years and that’s
Speaker 1 | 18:09.468
it yeah that’s setting a road map yeah yeah so i’m i’m one of six members on the tech leadership council for the medical center uh and we meet every monday to talk about shared challenges and and just for a little bit of background for the community of the medical center and for the listeners. The medical center at Columbia has certified IT groups or CITGs. And what that means is if you are a division or a department, again, say rheumatology or microbiology or immunology, you will have dedicated IT people that know your challenges, what applications you need, what sort of storage resources you need. So the Tech Leadership Council takes all of that information from those CIPDs and then dispels that to the CIO and CISO and the deans and the vice presidents and such. So before COVID, we had a massive budget, like a $7 or $8 million infrastructure upgrade for the network. Since COVID happened and now fewer people are back on campus, it’s been pared back. But my understanding… And the last conversation I had was that my building, which is the William Black building, is about to undergo a pretty extensive network upgrade, new switches, new lines, that sort of stuff, new Wi-Fi. So in terms of that, that’s what I can rely on them to. I rely upon the medical center to provide that infrastructure for me, unfortunately, where I don’t have to do all that stuff. But again, we’re at their whim and at the will of the university. So if you come in as a young PI. and you join the CCTI, you’re kind of in a good position because you have sort of this startup funds that you can tap into to get the microscope you need, to get the laptop you need, to get the desktops that you need for your lab. Other members come in, other principal investigators come in, and they came from, you know, John Hopkins or from Stanford, and they bring four or five people with them, and they get to transfer their grant money over to them. Nice. Yeah, they get to fund almost a lot of what they need, microscopes and such. Now, to get to the meat of your question, as I mentioned earlier, you know, researchers, just like patients, have discrete needs. So when this is where I kind of use my journalistic skills is I will meet with the PIs one on one and spend a fair amount of time with them and see what they’re doing, at least as far as I can understand the science and how my team can better support them. And maybe what they would want to do, like if they if they need flow cytometry analysis with this application, if they need to do, you know, high resolution imaging while there’s a. core down the hall that does it. We do it ourselves, but there might be somewhere else on campus. In terms of data storage, we started off in 2010, and we had, I remember, it was 620-some-odd gig of data. Now we’re well over 50-plus terabytes of data. I am in the process of moving everything into AWS. I have my containers set up. I have my S2 buckets and S3 buckets. And I’m moving everything into that in a secure channel because, you know, we’re governed by HIPAA compliance. Right. So we can’t let any of that stuff get outside. And I might ramble here, so just put a pin in me anytime you want.
Speaker 0 | 21:45.076
Don’t worry, I will.
Speaker 1 | 21:46.397
Yeah, right on. The data itself, you know, we need to hold on to that for three years because of… Right. you know, federal regulations. So.
Speaker 0 | 21:57.401
Look, actually, let me ask you a question about that, because I know in certain regulations, if you’re dealing with, I don’t know if this translates over to R&D, I think it might, though, if you’re dealing with any research that has to deal with people that are under the age of 18. And, you know, I know the requirements for retention differ in that case. And also, not only is it a, I think there’s also some state requirements as well on top of that.
Speaker 1 | 22:30.157
Well, there are parental consent that you need to get. For instance, we will take, we will ask patients for tissue samples, particularly when it comes to getting an organ transplant. If someone’s getting a kidney taken out and they’re getting a new kidney put in, we will take tissue samples from both the recipient. the donor kidney, excuse me, and the kidney coming out of the patient, the patients have to sign off, the parents have to sign off on. I guess, fortunately for me, I don’t run into that. I don’t have to worry about, you know, clinical data and clinical patient records because we don’t deal with it. Right. We do deal with pre-published research data. So, and we do deal with other sensitive data when it comes to, you know, mice and other animals that we use. studies. So while HIPAA doesn’t necessarily comply to that, we apply to those debt data. It is very sensitive data. And the medical center is hammered by other states and other actors, let’s say, for every minute of every day, trying to get into our network to steal that data, to not just get social security numbers. I give my… colleagues at New York Presbyterian and those in Columbia that run clinical operations, a lot of credit because they are hammered day in and day out for people trying to get PHI or personal health info. Yeah, I believe that you’re right about that, that you do have to hold on to that data a little bit longer. But again, what’s fortunate for me is that the data that the clinical data that we do deal with is all in our large EHR system, EPIC. which I mentioned earlier to you beforehand. So that is all under the stewardship of other teams.
Speaker 0 | 24:29.842
For anybody that hasn’t worked in healthcare, Epic is one of, you know, and there’s a couple out there, but probably one of the biggest solutions that hospitals use most often when dealing with patient care and putting all that information in, charting, you know, putting into a case, all that type of fun little stuff that medical professionals need to do and store all that data.
Speaker 1 | 24:57.795
Looking up records,
Speaker 0 | 24:59.138
you know. Yep.
Speaker 1 | 25:01.165
We had 26 homegrown and various EHR systems for epicanthus. Just as a quick example, organ transplant surgeons had to use three different applications just to store pathology results, patient data, and images of the organs themselves. And now they have one.
Speaker 0 | 25:22.186
Yeah. It is these big HR systems actually did help from a standpoint of allowing patients to be able to get that information a lot easier. But it was it was no it was quite a project for anybody that’s gone through it. Anyone switching an ER system, it’s like, you know, probably on or higher the level than switching your ERP. Right. I mean, it’s a it’s it’s a pretty, pretty vast solution.
Speaker 1 | 25:57.910
But it also takes just as long to train the people, the users, the nurses, the clinicians, how to use the application almost as long as it takes to bring it on.
Speaker 0 | 26:04.994
No doubt. It’s funny, but I’ve seen I’ve seen nurses turn tech just to just to implement these solutions. And actually they get like they they’re a nurse and all of a sudden they turn into a technician. And now they’re now they’re a super user. And. and they work in between those two.
Speaker 1 | 26:25.205
Yeah, and one other thing I wanted to mention is that in these EHR systems, the challenge for a lot of drawing information out of these records is natural language processing. There’ll be a memo field where a doctor could put copious notes in and detailed notes, or a nurse could put them in with a memo field that the application doesn’t collect. So the challenge then… can be for a data warehouse, how to extract that information out so that it is accurate, but it doesn’t allow anyone on the other end, it doesn’t have the right to see that, PHI or PII. For instance, the doctor in the memo field could put, you know, James is a 51-year-old non-Hispanic male that had a liver transplant, comes from Connecticut, blah, blah, blah, etc. You want to know what his blood type was, what his reaction was, what medicines he was on. if it’s not in the application for some reason, but you don’t want to know his name. You don’t want to know where he lives. So that’s a big challenge.
Speaker 0 | 27:31.114
Deidentification is always a big challenge, and reporting too, because you mentioned two pieces on that. How do I de-identify the data so I can get the statistics to help with the research? But the second one is, how do I pull free-form text? and be able to sift through it and get the information I need if it’s not put into an actual field. That’s another huge piece on there. I think there are some technologies that exist now that may help with that, but still, it’s a lot of computational power, a lot of reporting needs to pull that in. That’s true. I want to jump into this because I don’t want to forget it. And actually, I think that this is kind of a good segue to do that. Being the fact that you come from a journalist background, one of the things I saw that was really exciting in your LinkedIn is that you were talking about your user experience writing, which I have a lot of. It makes me really excited because one of the items that I end up dealing with so much, no matter where I work. is the user experience and identifying what their journey is, how they see it through their eyes, how IT is shown through their eyes, and what their experience is going to be. And then finding out what the actual experience is and trying to fix those too. But this concept of this user experience writing, I want to know how you implement that into your… in your field, you know, and how that comes across and maybe what that, how that helps your, you know, IT in the R&D field. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 29:31.188
So, I mean, the first thing is simply asking questions, right? Like, we have, I can’t tell you how many researchers, postdocs, scientific people, advisors and such that come in, students come in, who are these brilliant, brilliant scientific minds, brilliant overall. I mean, they, you know, they can play a concerto, you know, Paganini, you know, whatever, violin concerto. or whatever, you know, with their eyes closed and they can hypothesize about how T cells are going to react with a certain blood cell or something. And then it comes to a Windows box and they’re stymied, other than using the mouse around and learning how to use Word, right? Yeah. And I say to them, I have an extensive IT orientation with everybody that comes on, regardless of their experience. Um, and I, I asked them straight out. So what are you hoping to, uh, to achieve here? Um, what are your challenges with your computers? And, uh, you know, are you reticent to use them because you don’t understand them or you’re afraid you’re going to break something or you just don’t know enough because all you’ve ever done is spent time on an Apple, which, you know, admittedly Apple is great, but they’re hard, they’re hard to break into, right? Uh, a Windows computer, you can know enough about the with Windows computer to get yourself into a lot of trouble, right? Because it’s open wide. So I will explain to the users the reorientation, both first with an email and the document, like a cheat sheet I used, and tell them, here’s how I approach things. Now, let’s have a conversation about how my team can better suit what your needs are. Because the last thing I want to do is find out that someone is using an application that’s not sanctioned, because then that means I’m not doing my job well. If I find somebody who’s using Dropbox, for instance, which is verboten on campus, because we don’t have a business associate agreement with it, it means that we’re not doing something properly. So when it comes to explaining protocols, the usage cases, all that sort of stuff, I try to make it as palatable. in my explanations and in my documentation as possible. And I think that’s what you’re getting at. Yeah. The writing is, you know, you can put a white paper out, you can put an explanation out, you can put a protocol out that says, you know, here are the strict limits on everything that we do. But what I actually try to do is put in real use cases. I have a documentation for our freezer inventory application, which tracks everything that we have in freezers.
Speaker 0 | 32:26.971
Is that named Freezal?
Speaker 1 | 32:29.416
You know, that would be a good one. I should actually turn off that. Yeah, you’re right. Maybe that’s what I was thinking about. There you go. Maybe that’s what we’re talking about. The freezer app we have, you know, it helps you track all your tissue samples, your chemical products, your antibodies, whatever it is, down to the millimeter, how many vials you have until it expires, all that sort of stuff. And in the… In the… five or six page guide that I have where people know how to use it. I give them real case examples, which have happened with us, wherein, again, because our building is older, when the emergency power cuts out on a circuit, I’m sorry, when the power cuts out on the circuit and the freezer and the alarm system is on that same circuit, the emergency power doesn’t come on. The only time emergency power comes on is if the entire building loses juice. So I explained to them. with, you know, a real-time email, like snapshots of an email and an alert system from back in 2015 and then another one from late last year, or early last year. The alert system telling the technician, freezers are down, here’s how to use this app. You know, you have to get in there to get to your samples before they defrost and move them out. So I like to use real-time examples. I like to just keep things conversational. And it makes me feel more comfortable. Because when I talk to a scientist and they start getting into the nitty gritty of their science, you know, I lose, you know, I always try to stay on target, which is my favorite, one of my favorite quotes from the original Star Wars. Stay on target. Stay on target. Yeah. I try to stay focused on what they’re talking about, but I lose the thread pretty quickly. I don’t want that to happen with me and my team. When we explain to them what’s happening or the changes that are coming, for instance, when I’m moving all the data into AWS, I’m explaining almost every step of the way. what I’m doing and what they can expect. And there’s nothing, I will have a conversation with anybody about any sort of technology they want to bring onto the, into the center or anything that they’re having a problem with that they think just doesn’t serve their purposes. You can’t go wrong with. Just staying on the front lines, getting to know people, getting to know their challenges. I mean, in this realm, it’s the first and foremost thing. Again, I go back to the discrete needs that the researchers have. Someone that studies influenza needs to study the actions of specific cells. Someone that studies aging needs to study protein markers and DNA sequences and stuff like that. So they have different tools that they need to accomplish their science.
Speaker 0 | 35:19.733
You mentioned front lines, and that’s another piece that you have actually written on your LinkedIn, where you were talking about… um, you know, technology professionals, no matter what their title is, you know, they need to, and I’m paraphrasing here, but it’s close, it’s close enough, right? They need to stay close to the front lines. Right. And, um, let’s elaborate on that for a while, for a minute. Like, um, why, and I agree with you, by the way, I agree with you. They definitely need to stay close to the front lines, but why is that the case? If you can tell our listeners why It’s so important, no matter what title you carry, right, that you stay at the front lines and understand what’s going on. I think it would be beneficial.
Speaker 1 | 36:10.912
Sure. It’s a matter of, first and foremost, providing your customers with the best solutions. Customers, in the case of Mondo researchers. But just as importantly, I know the challenges that my team are running into. day in and day out. If the application that we partnered with years ago to keep track of our mouse colony is no longer sufficient because the guys, my technicians, are hearing from the lab members, I tried to do X, Y, and Z in this application and it just isn’t working or it’s too clunky or the learning curve is too steep. And I start hearing that back from my technicians. They say, oh, no one uses this application. Well, that’s important for me to know because then I know, okay, we have a big challenge on our hands and we need to address this because the application that we’re spending a lot of money on isn’t solving anyone’s problem. But more importantly for me is when something comes in, you know, it’s an analysis application. It’s an image acquisition application. So being part of the purchase, the evaluation, and ultimately the training helps me because I can talk that shop with the scientists. And I, in turn, know how better to support the applications just from me. I could talk to someone in the hallway that says, hey, you know that Halo microscope we just spent $75,000 on? And this application that it runs is having a problem with Active Directory logins. I could say, yeah, I think I know exactly where it is. I remember it from the training and through the settings where we may go to fix that. I’ll get someone on that, or maybe I’ll just go help you with myself. It’s also just more exciting to be part of that stuff, right? I’m not going to necessarily get under anyone’s desk and help them unplug network cables to see if that’s a problem. Let me send someone else to do that. But I actively, because I enjoyed learning about IT. so much in the environment that I was, you know, sort of taught it in. And the two individuals, again, Doug and Tom, those guys back in the day that taught me everything. I had such a good time that I feel like I could also teach other people sort of the same methods and have the same fun with it that I did. And I think that when you get to something as, let’s say, with SharePoint or even Outlook. And I go to someone and I could say, well, look what you can do in the options here. You know, people, you know, scientists, when I see a scientist’s mind get blown because they’re like, you’re a genius. I’m like, no, I’m not a genius. I just I’ve just gone to file options probably a hundred times because I’ve had to fix my own problem.
Speaker 0 | 39:13.873
It is it is a remarkable thing when, you know, you look at the stuff you do and. And you do it every day and you don’t think anything of it. Right. And then we try to explain it to other people. You know, sometimes you see their eyes gloss over and then you have to kind of use the use case scenarios, use analogies and stuff to be able to help them understand those pieces. And you then you kind of kind of get a good understanding of why it’s so difficult for. end users, consumers, customers, whatever we want to, however their, you know, you know, their relationship is with us to explain their problems and what’s going on. I mean, especially if you, you know, hey, I have this specific microscope and I need it to go down to this specific, you know, setting. And when it gets to that setting, I go to take a picture, it’s blurry, and I don’t know why it’s only that one. And you’re like, Okay, well, let’s just start kind of working on the troubleshooting piece. You don’t have any idea of what they’re talking about at the moment, but you do know how to fix and work through different computer issues, regardless of where they are in the array. I mean, some are more challenging than others and everything. I’ve seen some really challenging problems originate right on the help desk and then turn into massive projects. And that’s, I think, would be another reason why staying close to the front lines is a great thing, because then you can kind of control that end user experience and shape it to actually be more strategic, right?
Speaker 1 | 41:00.104
That’s exactly it. And I was going to say, and also, you know, when you go to in front of a board in a position such as mine, or if you’re a CIO, you go before a board or a dean, you have active knowledge about the challenges that the IT team is having. you can give them specifics that, well, we’re, we’re, we’re spending a lot of money, you know, with help desk calls because the, you know, password renewal system isn’t working the way it should be, or it’s not intuitive or there are too many options or it’s the timeout is too short, things like that. Like I can see all that stuff and go there and say, well, look, here are the infrastructure changes we need to make. And in fact, in fact, like I was saying earlier, I’m part of the technology leadership council at the medical center at Columbia. And actually medical center and we make uh suggestions continually to the upper echelons of the university based upon what the our our frontline tech uh users uh support staff are running into um and we’re making you know suggestions about like in-house microsoft office specialists uh because if you’ve ever used microsoft 0365 which we’ve hitched our wagon to and i find it to be really useful there’s a lot there that we could do a lot more than we’re actually using it for but you know you need to be able to convince the upper teams of the upper again echelons of the university like there’s value here we’re not just spending money like it’s not just a cost center IT is not a cost center anymore it is a value-added department and division and these people that are doing doing the legwork for IT and bringing in the technology when you break it all down you know what we’re doing is we’re providing the researchers and by proxy the patients much better service and um and what’s more is when you when you apply for a grant um and you can you know put in your grant proposal uh the sorts of cutting edge or sort of you know um viable let’s say standardized or um you know i don’t call it generational but technology that you’ve had and has proven over time the graders at the nih and other foundations will look at your grant proposal and say you know what it looks like they can do more with the money so by that you’re more likely to get a higher score and more likely to get the grant so make making it known to the university that the more money you put into it and the more value you put onto it the more you’re going to get back.
Speaker 0 | 43:43.298
So in a minute, we’re going to jump to our last segment, right? But before we go into that, you touched on something, and honestly, it reminded me of when I first jumped on my first podcast with Phil interviewing me. And we talked about IT not being a cost center, right? And I was pretty adamant about it, because at the time I was doing some changes to uplift IT. at another spot. And the importance of this is really crucial, especially when you’re in healthcare, when you’re in finance, when you’re in any of the fields that require additional security requirements. Healthcare can’t be a cost center. And if anybody is… It’s truly going in there with that mindset. If there are business leaders that have a mindset that IT is a cost center, they are going to end up getting hacked. They’re going to end up with a breach. They’re going to end up making shortcuts that are just not going to ultimately make the best long-term decisions. Long-term… executives with vision need to treat their IT departments, not as a cost center, but like, as you mentioned, a strategic value add, because that’s what they can do. And not only that, if utilized properly, and I think you’ll agree with this, Michael, they can actually reduce costs in other areas.
Speaker 1 | 45:20.084
Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 45:21.324
And you mentioned identifying applications that are no longer in use. Working with the people on the front lines to identify options to increase productivity and different pieces of that. That mindset needs to permeate a bit into the bit. Now, I do want to move on. By the way, I could speak to Michael for hours and hours and hours. Just so you know, you’re always welcome to come back here. Just let me talk to you about some more stuff because I would love to do. migrate this stuff up to AWS, I want to have you back because I want to talk about your data migration strategy. I want to talk about the data classification strategy that you used and all these different pieces. So I would love to have you back. But we’re not done yet. It’s IT crystal ball time, right? Where we talk about the future of IT. Everyone knows at this point, AI is not allowed in the conversation. That’s here. It’s present, right?
Speaker 1 | 46:23.145
Okay.
Speaker 0 | 46:24.506
unless there’s a future state that you want to talk about. And there might be, and that’s fine. But what I want to do is, since we have you here, I would love to talk about the future of IT in research and development. I think that this is really the area that we want to look at. With all the pieces, we all know what happened a couple years ago, and it lasted several years. And it all impacted us and research and development. A ton of money went into research and development to find ways to fix that solution. Okay, well, now we’re coming out of it. Still money popping in. Maybe in a tougher climate, tougher environment. But where are we going? Are we going to be able to stay ahead? Are there things coming down the pike that we should be aware of from a technological standpoint, IT standpoint?
Speaker 1 | 47:22.890
So I think despite the challenges that we had over the last few years, I think that I think the broad consensus is that I don’t want to say IT saved the world, but it did save a lot of businesses, right? We rose to the challenge. Everybody could still communicate. Everybody could still compete. Everybody could still, for the most part, continue their research unabated. In my terms, I think what I see coming down is a lot more, I don’t see virtual reality as being a benefit to the boardroom. I just don’t see people going into it. I see it as virtual modeling. I see virtual mice. I see virtual primates. I see virtual human systems where I think that, in fact, there’s a 3D model now that some of the surgeons use that can give you sort of a sense of, you know, how to open someone up and get in there and do some, yeah, some work on the vena cava, some of the more sort of surface items. This is from conversations I’ve had with some surgeons.
Speaker 0 | 48:32.473
It’s like, it’s like virtual operation.
Speaker 1 | 48:36.416
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 0 | 48:37.717
I was never good at that game. I would always go and hit the buzzer. That’s why I didn’t become a surgeon. Two shaky hands, right? I can’t do it.
Speaker 1 | 48:44.523
And also the anxiety of getting that buzz was just way too much. On an aside, there was a game for, I don’t know if you remember, Intellivision. It was kind of the opposite to Atari. There was Atari, there was ColecoVision, and there was one from Mattel called Intellivision. And they had this really, really interesting application that was like, it was a human body, and you had to drive a little ship down, you had to blast blood cells, and you had to clear out blockages and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 0 | 49:08.117
It does sound familiar, actually.
Speaker 1 | 49:09.678
Yeah, you can find it on YouTube. But that’s what I see. I think that… Some of the dental medicine, and I’m specifically speaking about medical research now, the dental medicine group at our university has these chairs that can measure people’s heart rates. So you can see when someone’s gaining anxiety about an operation that they’re undergoing. Maybe they need a little bit more gas. Maybe they just need a calming presence. Maybe they need someone to take a step back. So.
Speaker 0 | 49:46.070
They’re diving into epigenetics.
Speaker 1 | 49:48.051
Yes, exactly. Yeah. And that’s, it is really paying off. And what’s interesting is that the dental patients, the dental students are learning right from that. from the get-go all that sort of stuff wow um yeah so the reliance upon technology there is going to be heavy but i think it’ll make them better dentists uh the surgeons um you know what i’ve had discussions with is is there a way that we can build a virtual mouse model that that operates um with uh blood flow with you know um exhalation and inhalation just like a real mouse would uh can we can we use I hate to say it, but can we use AI to help manufacture this device? I’ll allow it. Thank you. Thank you very much. That’s my one free pass. And then by that proxy, instead of spending money or the resources on actual mice, can we develop this into a genetically modified virtual mouse? Things like that, I think, are coming down.
Speaker 0 | 50:51.621
That’s amazing, actually, because I, you know. I would personally love to see us move past having to test on animals. But I think that as you get the technology and as you get that, you’re able to kind of start to knock down some of these things that are like, wow, now we don’t have to do this. Not only from a just smiley, cute, cuddly, but also it saves money. And it saves costs and resources and all this other items on there too, right? I mean, if you’re using a virtual model, I mean, you could just use it over and over again. Stop it, reload it. There’s a time savings involved in that. You can save multiple versions and play around with different ones and go back to them.
Speaker 1 | 51:37.407
Customize it the way you want and see how it would operate. And that’s part of personalized medicine, right? Is getting into the nitty gritty of how, you know, the mouse model itself. uh, could be changed so that you can target, let’s say diabetes. If you can induce cancer or diabetes in a small mouse and its population, then you can target that mouse for, um, immunological, uh, treatments rather than trying it out on, you know, 10,000 humans and seeing what happens.
Speaker 0 | 52:07.924
That’s a, no, that’s a great, that’s a, that’s a really interesting, uh, uh, take and look on that. And I think that’s a fantastic idea. Um, I would love to see that come into fruition. right yeah whistle mouse model coming to a coming to a copy uh a copy center soon or micro center soon brought to you by fiesel brought to you by that’s what it was fiesel yeah i know i i think you made a new one which was whistle and fiesel and and like i said you better rush to get these things uh uh trademarked before this goes in the air right
Speaker 1 | 52:43.038
yeah exactly whistle and fiesel
Speaker 0 | 52:46.720
uh you know the main names will be bought right after this so they don’t already exist if they do we’re gonna drive some traffic your way that’s good well um nerds this is uh been michael moore i’ve been hosting this podcast for dissecting popular it nerds um i’ve been here with michael fauché director of informational tech sorry information technology for the columbia center of translational immunology a lot of words there i i ran out of uh I ran out.
Speaker 1 | 53:17.212
Next time we chat, you can just say C-C-T-I. I should have said that from the beginning.
Speaker 0 | 53:21.454
So C-C-T-I. Now he gives me that. He gives me that thing. Michael, absolute pleasure having you on. And I want to have you on. And so just message me when you’re ready to talk some more and we can do that. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 | 53:34.998
You got it. My pleasure. It was good speaking with you, Mike. Have a good day.
