Resume

Professional Summary

Creative technologist and technical leader with 35+ years across government R&D, industry product development, and mission-driven technology. Specializes in conceiving, architecting, and delivering novel data products in semantic knowledge bases, natural language processing, and applied AI. Most interested in strategic roles at the intersection of research and delivery, shaping what gets built and solving hard technical problems.

Professional Experience

Biblica, Inc. (formerly Clear Bible)

Member of the Bible Technology Team (7 people), focused on dataset development and R&D prototypes supporting Bible translation and engagement. Clear Bible was acquired by Biblica in August 2023.

Knowledge Director and Data Scientist, Biblica, Inc. (Aug 2023 – present)

Principal Data Scientist, Clear Bible (Oct 2022 – Aug 2023)

Selected projects:

  • ACAI (Aquifer Concept Architecture for Information) — Conceived, promoted, and helped design a structured knowledge base of biblical entities and other information; now a key resource for the Bible Aquifer (an ETEN Innovation Lab project). Contributed conception, architecture, direct curation, and supporting tooling.
  • Enhanced Resources++ (ER++) — Expanded and generalized data and tooling access to reference resources for Bible translators.
  • ClearAligner — Co-developed an editor for Bible alignment data; defined data standards and built tools for managing alignments.
  • Faith-aligned LLM benchmarks (with Gloo) — Defined standards and tooling for constructing and executing benchmarks for faith-aligned LLMs.
  • BibleChat topical analysis (for Gloo) — Performed topic clustering analysis of the BibleChat corpus.
  • Manser’s Dictionary of Bible Themes — Acquired and parsed a dataset of 2k hierarchically-organized biblical themes for downstream use.

Open-source contributions at github.com/Clear-Bible: Biblelib, Biblealignlib, Alignments, BibleThemes, CommonEval.

Continuities with prior work: semantic knowledge bases and information architecture. New directions: applied work with LLMs and generative AI, and deeper engagement with the needs of the Bible translation community.

Faithlife (2007 – 2022)

Led development of semantic knowledge bases, controlled vocabularies, and linguistic datasets that underpinned reference, navigation, visualization, and digital-library integration across the Logos platform.

Director of Content Innovation (2011 – 2022)

  • Led a cross-functional team of subject experts and programmers building novel datasets and information products for the digital library platform.
  • Delivered controlled vocabularies, reference knowledge bases, semantic lexicons, and linguistic analyses integrated across seven major software releases.
  • Designed and rolled out streamlined publication processes that reduced time-to-release for new data products.

Senior Information Architect (2007 – 2011)

  • Led creation of foundational datasets for biblical people, places, things, and events — the structured-data backbone that many downstream Faithlife products depend on.
  • Managed a team of biblical data curators.

BBN Technologies (1987 – 2006)

Nineteen years at a leading human-language-technology R&D company, primarily serving the federal R&D market in NLP, information extraction, text categorization and retrieval, and speech-to-text transcription.

  • Director, Program Management (2000 – 2006) — Directed NLP technology transfer for government agencies in the Washington, DC area, and led related marketing activities.
  • Senior Scientist, Speech and Language Processing (1987 – 2000) — Supported government-funded R&D in Named Entity Recognition and Information Extraction, contributing to a body of work that helped define the field.

Selected Publications

  • “Discerning AI’s Expanding Role in Biblical Interpretation.” White paper prepared for Gloo (unpublished).
  • “Mapping the World of Theology” in The Ancient World Goes Digital — Case Studies on Archaeology, Texts, Online Publishing, Digital Archiving, and Preservation (Brill series on Digital Biblical Studies, forthcoming).
  • “Composite Gospel: Parallel Passages.” Faithlife, 2017. Available with a Logos license at ref.ly/logosres/cgprlllpssgs.
  • BBN-era publications in NLP and information extraction: ACM Author page, ResearchGate profile.

Selected Presentations

Recent (Biblica)

  • “Measuring What Matters: Towards a Common Evaluation Framework for Christian LLMs.” Missional AI, Dallas, TX. 2025-04-10.
  • “ACAI: Reference Datasets for Biblical Entities.” Partnership for Applied Biblical NLP meeting. 2024-09-27.
  • “Alignment Data for Enhancing Resources.” Partnership for Applied Biblical NLP meeting. 2024-03-22.
  • “ER++: Extending Enhanced Resources for Translator Understanding.” BT Conference, Dallas, TX. 2023-10-13.
  • “Enhanced Resources++: Extending Enhanced Resources for Translator Understanding.” Internal Biblica presentation. 2023-10-06.

Earlier highlights

  • “Mapping the World of Theology.” BibleTech 2019, Seattle, WA.
  • “Seeing the Big Picture: Visualizing Bible Data.” BibleTech 2015, Seattle, WA.
  • “Using a Controlled Vocabulary for Managing a Digital Library Platform.” Semantic Technology Conference 2010.
  • “Natural Language Processing using Python and NLTK.” LinuxFest Northwest 2008, Bellingham, WA.
  • “Weaving the New Testament into the Semantic Web.” Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, 2006.

A fuller archive of earlier presentations — including talks at BibleTech (2008 – 2019), SBL Annual Meetings, LinuxFest Northwest, and the Semantic Technology Conference — is available at semanticbible.com/other/talks/presentation-index.html.

Patent Applications

  • “Name Browsing Systems and Methods”. U.S. Patent Application US20040199495A1. Filed Oct. 2004. Application not pursued.

Education

  • MA in Computational Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, 1986.
  • BA in Linguistics and Anthropology, Occidental College, 1980.
  • Graduate coursework in distance education, University of Maryland.

Selected Skills

  • Research & applied AI: Natural language processing, large language models, generative AI, machine learning, information extraction.
  • Data & knowledge architecture: Semantic knowledge bases, ontology engineering, controlled vocabularies, knowledge management, information architecture, data modeling, semantic web technologies.
  • Delivery & leadership: Technical leadership, R&D-to-product translation, cross-functional team leadership, technical project management.
  • Tools: Python, Pandas, Django, Git.

Professional Associations

  • Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
  • Society of Biblical Literature (SBL)