Patrick Herron, Jenkins Chair, Duke

Patrick Herron is Research Analyst & Technologist for the Kimberly J. Jenkins Chair in New Technologies and Society at Duke University and is excited to be working on the Digital Learning project in support of the development of the game and its website.

Patrick's responsibilities in support of the Jenkins Chair, Tim Lenoir, cover a broad range of research, development and educational roles. His current research and development focuses on the automation of innovation analysis through the development of novel analytics and text mining approaches. He is currently applying such techniques and tools to analyzing global dynamics of nanotechnology research and development, in particular the flow of collaboration between the US and China and its impact on each nation's production.

Prior to joining Duke Patrick completed his MS in Information Science at UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Library and Information Science with a minor in Computer Science and a certificate in Bioinformatics. While at UNC Patrick's main research focus was on automated classification and clustering of large heterogeneous consumer health web collections. His master's thesis on the adoption of text mining technologies for drug discovery was recently published by VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller. Some of the innovations in text mining Patrick developed in graduate school have been utilized in the ground-breaking commercial patent search tool SparkIP.

While in graduate school Patrick ran his own web technologies consultancy while also working both as research assistant for ibiblio.org and a developer for SAS. At ibiblio Patrick developed data transformation utilities for a 3-D book reader. At SAS Patrick created an entirely new topical site architecture for SAS Global as well as an application for dynamically managing the site structure based on user search behaviors. Before attending UNC for graduate school Patrick spent two years studying genetics and biochemistry at NC State, working as a genetics toxicology research intern at the NIEHS. Before that, Patrick graduated with honors from UNC-Chapel Hill in Philosophy with a heavy focus on cognitive science and linguistics.

In addition to working as a software developer and web designer for the last twelve years Patrick has been steadily proliferating as a poet and multimedia artist. His website proximate.org was the first poetics-based web site to be included in the New Museum for Contemporary Art's Rhizome collection. Patrick is the author of several books and chapbooks of poetry including the recently-released Be Somebody (Effing Press) acclaimed by noted poets ron Silliman and Kent Johnson. Patrick has been innovating at the intersection of electronic media and poetry for nearly a decade, having recently received recognition from Pitchfork Media for his work in digital music. Patrick is also the founder of the Carrboro Poetry Festival and the former Poet Laureate of Carrboro, NC.