Full Journey

From Wisconsin river skiing to Nature publications - a non-linear path to computational science

Wisconsin Roots

Born in the 1980s in a mid-sized Wisconsin town, I spent my early years on the Chippewa River: waterskiing, exploring outdoors, and absorbing my family’s strong work ethic. But I wanted more than the path immediately visible to me.

The solution: join the Air National Guard and pursue college. Military service would prove I could work hard and deliver under pressure. College would provide knowledge that experience alone couldn’t teach. Looking back, it was my first exercise in outcome-driven thinking - identifying what success looked like, then determining what was needed to achieve it.

Aviation Dreams and Course Corrections

I started as an aviation management major at Mankato State University in Minnesota, pursuing my childhood dream of commercial aviation. At 14, a discovery flight on a school field trip hooked me completely. By 17, I had my private pilot’s license.

But post-9/11 aviation became less appealing. Time for course correction: pivot to my second love, photography.

Professional Photography

During college, I photographed weddings for friends and family, but my passion was scenic photography. A fellow service member challenged me to study and reproduce the large-format landscape style of Ken Duncan. He rented me equipment for a weekend in Minneapolis/St. Paul to prove I could do it.

I returned with rolls of film that impressed him enough to commission a trip: my girlfriend and I drove the Florida coast photographing landscapes. The result: nearly $5,000 worth of prints ranging from three to eight feet wide decorating his walls.

This success drove me to change majors to photography at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

The Digital Transition

At UW-Eau Claire, I struggled between the department’s silver halide (film) emphasis and emerging digital techniques. I took a graphic design job at Awards and More to pursue my interests in Photoshop and InDesign. When digital photography classes opened up, I became an unofficial teaching assistant, tutoring classmates.

After marriage, my wife pursued graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where I followed to finish my degree.

Leadership in Photography Business

While attending UW-Milwaukee, I joined Visual Image Photography as a school pictures photographer. I identified opportunities where my computer and technology expertise could add value. By the end of the first season: Assistant Director. By the next year: Director of the School Pictures department, managing three full-time office staff, fifteen full-time photographers, and over 30 seasonal photographers.

But I saw the writing on the wall. Digital photography was becoming accessible to everyone. School picture sales were stagnating. The industry would consolidate. My career trajectory had limits.

Discovery of Computer Science

During my time at VIP, I befriended the in-house programmer building custom software to track orders through production. I was fascinated. I’d never programmed anything beyond my middle school calculator.

He taught me programming basics and let me write code for my department. This changed everything.

I returned to college to finish my undergraduate degree - this time as a computer science major. Programming turned out to be the subject that made me truly pay attention in school. UW-Milwaukee’s excellent CS department taught me everything from high-level languages down to hardware. For the first time, I understood computers at a fundamental level.

The Intersection: Photography Meets Computer Science

While looking for a class to tie in my photography skills (or at least manipulate my thousands of images), I found Dr. Andrew Cohen’s “Cell and Tissue Image Analysis” class which was cross-listed for undergrad and graduate students.

One day, struggling with homework, I visited his office for help. He was working on a difficult problem of his own: finding a particular cell in an image. I offered photography knowledge - how I’d approach it in Photoshop. Our vocabulary was completely different, making communication difficult.

He asked me to take the image and manipulate it my way. By the next day, I’d delivered something that wasn’t quite right, but showed the right mindset. He offered me a job learning image analysis techniques while building a user interface for another project.

It was perfect: combining newly acquired programming knowledge with artistic abilities. Professor Cohen convinced me to continue my education. UW-Milwaukee had an MS/BS track where graduate-level classes would count toward both degrees.

Graduate School and the Big Move

If you’d told high school me I’d earn not just one but two graduate degrees, I wouldn’t have believed you.

I finished undergrad and started my master’s with a semester’s worth of credits already completed. Then, due to state politics, Professor Cohen explored options elsewhere. One day he announced: “You’re getting your master’s degree this semester, and you can pursue your PhD at Drexel University.”

Moving my wife and young child halfway across the country to Philadelphia was daunting. But I couldn’t refuse the opportunity to continue research at such a respected institution.

HHMI Janelia: Developing the Outcome-Driven Framework

After five years in Philadelphia and nearing the end of my PhD, I accepted a position at HHMI Janelia Research Campus in Virginia. As a Data Scientist at the Advanced Imaging Center, I worked with biologists from around the world on cutting-edge microscopy research.

This is where I developed my outcome-driven methodology - ensuring teams continuously return to “what does success look like?” throughout execution, not just initial planning. Advising 170+ international scientists annually taught me to translate vague biological questions (“study the dynamics of organelles”) into rigorous quantitative experiments with measurable outcomes.

I published this framework in Journal of Cell Science (2020) as “Hypothesis-driven quantitative fluorescence microscopy.” The approach prevented researchers from acquiring terabytes of impressive but uninformative data.

While working full-time at Janelia, I completed my PhD in Computer Engineering in 2019.

Hydra Image Processor - the open-source GPU-accelerated image analysis library that would become my signature technical contribution - began at Drexel (first commit: August 2013) and matured significantly during my time at Janelia. It is still actively used and improved today (12+ years later) and was published in Bioinformatics (2019), achieving 100x speedups over CPU implementations.

My work contributed to publications in Nature (2017, 2021), Nature Communications, and IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

Building Business Leadership: Co-Founding Winter Wait Consulting

During the tail end of grad school and throughout most of my time at Janelia, I co-founded Winter Wait Consulting LLC, specializing in HPC (High-Performance Computing) consulting.

This venture provided invaluable business experience that complemented my research work:

  • Leading technical teams - Managing consulting projects and coordinating specialists
  • Creating robust tools - Building production-grade solutions for client HPC infrastructure
  • Business communication - Translating technical improvements into business value for leadership
  • Strategic problem-solving - Applying my outcome-driven methodology to optimize client compute architectures

Running a consulting business while conducting cutting-edge research taught me to balance academic rigor with business pragmatism. I learned to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, manage client expectations, and deliver solutions that served both computational excellence and business objectives.

This experience proved essential preparation for my later transition to startup leadership at Elephas, where I would need to bridge research, product development, and business strategy.

Military Service: 21 Years of Leadership

Throughout this journey, I served in the Air National Guard for 21 years, rising to Command Post Superintendent. I earned the Meritorious Service Medal twice (the highest peacetime award for non-commissioned officers):

First MSM (2004-2014): Innovation in training systems and process creation

  • Spearheaded training development for the Air Force’s first Joint Command Post, combining requirements across multiple branches into a unified program
  • Created a knowledge database and test generator that became the model for command posts throughout the Air Force
  • Designed Emergency Action checklists ensuring time-critical messages were handled accurately and expeditiously
  • Deployed to Operation CORONET OAK (Haiti relief efforts), working shifts up to 24 hours to ensure mission success

Second MSM (2014-2019): Leadership and execution of a successful Command Post

  • Led Command Post to satisfactory evaluation during Exercise Iron Ore (May 2018)
  • Implemented technology-driven efficiency improvements for time-sensitive requirements
  • Set standard in leadership: ensuring every team member had everything needed to succeed, supporting both military and civilian career opportunities

In fall 2019, I concluded my military service. After 21 years, I recognized it was time to allow those I was leading to fill leadership roles themselves. Stepping aside would enable their growth while letting me focus on raising my kids and the fascinating science at Janelia. It coincided with completing my PhD dissertation - a natural inflection point.

I had no idea the pandemic was just months away.

This decision reflected a principle that guides my leadership: knowing when to step aside so others can grow. The best leaders multiply impact through others - and sometimes that means getting out of the way of people ready to lead.

Military service taught me communication under pressure, training as a force multiplier, operational discipline, and cross-functional coordination - skills that translate directly to technical leadership in high-stakes environments like medical diagnostics and production AI systems.

Strategic Transition: Reading the Environment

The Advanced Imaging Center was a traveling scientist lab - researchers came from around the world to use cutting-edge microscopy. But the COVID-19 pandemic transformed this model (early 2020). Lockdowns made visiting and operating the department extremely challenging. International scientists couldn’t travel. Hands-on collaboration became nearly impossible.

I’d learned throughout my career to examine the world around me to inform when to make life changes - from recognizing the consolidation coming in school photography, to pivoting from aviation post-9/11. This was another inflection point. The work I loved required in-person collaboration, and the pandemic fundamentally changed that landscape.

Time to look for the next opportunity where I could make impact.

Elephas Biosciences: Product Vision and Leadership

I joined Elephas Biosciences in Madison, WI in 2021 when the company was small (~30 people), shifting from research to product development in a startup environment.

Adaptability as a Strength: Like a chameleon adapting to its environment, I transitioned seamlessly between roles - not because of planned career progression, but because the business needed different capabilities at different stages of growth.

I started as a Data Scientist but quickly expanded into Manager of Microscopy, training and guiding microscope operators on our bespoke instruments to collect “informative” data - applying my outcome-driven methodology from Janelia to ensure experiments would answer business-critical questions, not just generate impressive but unusable results.

Later, I transitioned to Principal Data Scientist, leading a team focused on these critical challenges:

  1. Microscope optimization: Making our custom imaging systems faster, more reliable, and operator-friendly
  2. System consolidation: Integrating different imaging modalities (FLIM, multiphoton, dOCT) into a unified platform
  3. Strategic data requirements: Determining what “necessary” data to collect for business needs - not everything possible, but everything required

This role taught me product vision and execution discipline in a startup context. I wasn’t just implementing technical solutions - I was helping define product roadmaps, collaborating with biology, engineering, marketing, and finance teams to translate “what if?” questions into production-ready clinical tools while balancing ambitious vision with resource constraints.

Key achievements:

  • 90%+ reduction in cancer diagnostics analysis times (days to hours)
  • Multi-site reproducibility for oncology research
  • FDA-aligned validation frameworks
  • Cross-functional team leadership (software, biology, engineering, operations) - seamlessly shifting between technical implementation, operational management, and strategic planning as business needs evolved
  • Built and led technical teams through rapid company growth
  • Promotion to Principal Data Scientist (2023)

The work contributed to publications in Biomedical Optics Express (2024) and advanced the field of optical coherence microscopy for cell viability assessment.

Today: Seeking Big Ideas

This non-linear path - from river skiing to aviation to professional photography to business leadership to computer science to biological imaging to product development - taught me that innovation happens at intersections.

What drives me now is being part of something bigger than myself. I’m energized by projects that seek to be the best or bring the most good back to the world. Whether it’s cancer diagnostics that help patients, biological discoveries published in Nature, or open-source tools that democratize GPU computing, I want my work to matter beyond the immediate deliverable.

I thrive in environments where:

  • Ambitious vision drives the organization
  • Mission matters beyond profit
  • My influence scales through leadership, mentorship, and systems that outlive me
  • Technical excellence serves purpose - enabling real impact

I’m not interested in incremental improvements to established markets. I want to help build what hasn’t been built before, solve problems others say can’t be solved, and create tools that empower entire communities.

View my current work → - Hydra Image Processor, cancer diagnostics, terabyte-scale biological imaging systems

Return to About → - How I think, execute, and build

Contact: info@ericwait.com | LinkedIn | GitHub