Three decades of putting weird ideas together with weird people — now you can see and share the whole thing.
👉 Explore the DGA Research Constellation
For more than three decades, I’ve had the pleasure of doing something that doesn’t have a clear name. It doesn’t fit neatly on a CV. There’s no NIH study section for it. It is definitely not a medical specialty. But it might be the most important!
I enjoy putting weird ideas together with weird people.
That’s it. That’s the engine.
A biomechanical engineer walks into a conversation with an ethnomusicologist. A device designer sits down with a trauma nurse who moonlights as a beekeeper. A philosopher of pain meets a computational biologist. And somewhere in the collision, something catches fire.
Today I’m giving the engine a map.
✨ The DGA Research Constellation
It’s an interactive visualization of every collaborator, every research theme, every collision that turned into a paper, a device, a new way of thinking about a problem. More than 1,700 coauthors. Thirty-plus years. One sprawling, tangled, beautiful web of connections that had no business existing — and yet here we are.
You can explore it by research theme. By decade. By how densely someone is connected to the rest of the network. Click a node and you’ll see what happened when a vascular surgeon started talking to a computer vision team, or when a wound care nurse connected the dots that nobody else in the room could see.
Why this matters
The academy loves convergence — in theory. In practice, the incentive structures push us toward ever-narrower lanes. Specialization gets funded. Interdisciplinary work gets polite applause and no budget. But the most transformative ideas I’ve witnessed in my career didn’t come from depth alone. They came from unexpected proximity. From putting people in a room who had no business being in the same room — and watching what happened next.
This constellation is proof of concept. Not every node became a landmark paper. Not every connection changed the field. But the network itself — the engine — is the thing. It’s the substrate. It’s the culture medium. And it’s still growing.
Here’s to the next 30!
Three decades down. Here’s to at least 30 more years of making introductions nobody asked for and building things nobody expected.
If you’re weird, you know where to find me! 🙂
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