Meet the Team

How a dinosaur learns to think outside the box

Precocious & unconventional

My lifelong interest in science and words took off when I was four, inspired by a drawing of dinosaurs in my father’s Boy Scout manual. Fascinated by these extinct monsters and delighted to learn that “dinosaur” meant “terrible lizard,” I devoured books at home and haunted the public library. Naturally, my family thought I would become a professor, and our camping trips furthered my interests in fossils, geology and Indian mounds.

From bones to business

My mother urged me to join the high school debate team and take typing class, avant-garde advice that I use to this day. Archaeological digs in high school led me to major in physical anthropology in college (minors in English & musicology). As a graduate fellow, I taught genetics and osteology, but the tenured positions were filled, so I left the field.

Following my now-husband’s example, I earned an MBA, expanding my worldview to include economics, finance, marketing, management and operations.

So, in the ’80s I was a banker: in Chicago doing tax-exempt bond arbitrage deals for cultural organizations, rescuing the Lyric Opera from financial disaster; in California making real estate loans for the bank Patty Hearst robbed. But falling interest rates and tax code changes deflated that bubble and triggered an avalanche of bank mergers. Laid off, I became a residential realtor, in time for the crash of ’91 but picking up copywriting, marketing and desktop publishing on the way.

Biotech & other high technologies

I forged a path combining science, writing and business, leading to a 30-year career in leading-edge technology communications. In the mid-’90s, on the rebound from my first full-time biotech job, I discovered the digital world and led a team that created one of the first biotech corporate websites. I met Bonnie Feldman when I was IR director at XOMA and she was an analyst covering the stock.

I entered the 21st Century as a partner in virtual IR/PR agency Kureczka|Martin Associates. We helped senior managers clarify and articulate their emerging companies’ strategic positioning and created a wide variety of content for print and online. Since 2003, I have been co-owner of boutique IT systems integrator Haddon Hill Group Inc, managing marketing, corporate communications and administration, as well as being editor-in-chief of our Haddon Hill Group website.

Over the decades, I’ve accumulated knowledge across many other domains: aesthetic medicine, blockchain, digital health, genomics, medical devices, microbiomics, pharmacology, optics, zoology and many others. I’m still an amateur naturalist; leisure interests include art, cocktails, dance, gardening, history, music, philosophy and period fiction: past and future.