Paul Stetson

Originally I’m from Central California (Visalia), but I came to Berkeley for college in 1982, and have made the Bay Area my home pretty much since then. After I got my degrees (in Electrical Engineering and Biophysics) I worked as a Software Quality Engineer on radiation-therapy machines at Varian Associates in Palo Alto.

I was a part-time Master’s student in Electrical Engineering at Stanford during this time, and after amazing myself by passing the qualifying exams, I went on to get my PhD in 1995. My thesis was on signal and image processing for medical ultrasound imaging. After a year of traveling and having fun teaching for Kaplan and working at a Marina District juice bar, I decided I needed to get a little more serious again.

Since I wasn’t through seeing the world, though, I looked overseas for jobs. I was a Research Assistant Professor at Technical University of Denmark from 1996-98, working in medical ultrasound signal and image processing. Click here for notes from a Pattern Recognition and Neural Nets course that I taught there. That course was one of my best experiences ever: being able to pick out the topics I wanted and tie them together into an integrated whole was really fun, and doing that in another cultural milieu added even more to the whole experience. Living in Denmark was tough for me, though, and I felt pretty alienated as a foreigner over there. There are some pretty good things about that country, but I think even they’ll admit that they’re a clannish, closed society.

So, homesick, I headed back to the Bay Area. Since then I’ve been living in the Piedmont Avenue area of Oakland, and working at Nellcor in Pleasanton, doing advanced development in pulse oximetry and respiratory technology. It’s great to be back!

my resume

my likes:

good food, travel, and foreign languages: I speak German and some French and Danish.

Humor: The Onion and This Modern World
Bizarro, Monty, and Rhymes with Orange
”I am better than your kids.” and Children's Books You'll Never See
USA Patriot Registration and Canada-Bashing
An Open Letter to Dr. Laura
God’s Total Quality Management Questionnaire
Jesus Inspirational Sport Statues and Jesus Images [I like the Dental Assistant…]

Music: Boards of Canada [spacey website!], KCSM-FM Jazz, Brian Eno, U2, R.E.M.,
Talking Heads, Beatles, etc.

my dislikes:

M X-Large SUV’s parked in Compact spots (the bigger the gashog, the bigger the flag…)
N most country music
L just about any time of day before 8 AM (unless I'm sleeping, or still up having fun...)
I guess if you really wanted to piss me off, you could drive your Cadillac Escalade EXT by my window at 6AM playing your favorite Nashville hits at top volume...

Last updated Nov. 2002 by pstetson@sbcglobal.net