I’m many things. But mostly, I’m just Ward.

Since the age of five I’ve been programming computers, from creating my own games as a kid to building N-body simulations in high school to running massively distributed fluid dynamics simulations on supercomputers to spending the last two decades building infrastructure and technology organizations from startup to enterprise in scale. That’s closing on five decades at the keyboard.

I never stopped writing the code. At ShiftHealth AI I built both the mobile app and the back end myself; at Lium AI I’m CTO and founding engineer. The title changes, the work doesn’t.

See where I’ve built

Since before I could speak, people knew I was different; but not in what way. I was born in a time when autism was neither well-understood, easily diagnosed, nor well-received.

It was not till my mid 30s that multiple professionals independently suspected I was on the spectrum. By this time, I learned an effective set of “neural-typical behaviors” to such a degree that nowadays I do not present as autistic. Till then I thought I was a “broken” or “devolved” human-being. Finding out that I was autistic was this great gift; it meant I was not broken, but just different. As consequence, I embraced my differences in ways I never could growing up, and discovered I love who I am.

So why call myself out in this manner? In a word: stigma. I do not have autism; I am autistic. It is not a disease. It is not contagious. It is an integral part of how I process and interact with the world and the people in it.

As a technology leader, I want to stand as an example of what an autistic person can accomplish, even excel at. Too often we see autistic folks as “brilliant but not as leaders.” This may be true for some, but the same can be said for people who’re neural-typical.

I view the camera lens as a vehicle to explore the natural world around me. Camera in hand, I’ve traveled many parts of the world, allowing my autistic, introverted self the opportunity to slip in amongst people, both simultaneously as participant and voyeur. It’s through my camera that I learned how to bring color back to my artwork.

While I took a bit of a hiatus in my early twenties from art, it’s always been as much a part of me as science, technology, and mathematics. In some ways, I think art is more dear to me at a deeply personal level, as I find in the development of even esoteric equations describing first principles physics a sense of self expression no different than when I pick up the proverbial brush to create a piece of artwork.