About Wolfgang Rumpf

I'm Dr. Wolfgang Rumpf, and since you opened this page I'm assuming that you want to know a little about me.  Fair enough.

Born and raised in Ohio, I fell in love with science - and biology in particular - at an early age.  I had a fantastic high school biology teacher at Chaminade-Julienne High School - when I discovered the Hardy-Weinberg equations and saw how mathematics could be applied to population genetics, I was sold.

In college I initially started out as pre-med until the University Survey Course at The Ohio State University brought in a podiatrist to talk to us about all the foot diseases he'd seen and treated.  The slide show convinced me that I should perhaps stick to general biology.  I received my B.S. in Biology from the University of Dayton in 1988.

At the point I looked around and decided that I didn't like any of the jobs I could get with a B.S., and enrolled in the M.S. program.  Two years later, I had an M.S. in Genetics from the University of Dayton - and was still unhappy with the sorts of jobs I could get even at that level.

In 1990 I moved to Columbus Ohio and went back to The Ohio State University in the Department of Molecular Genetics.  I worked in the laboratory of C. William Birky, Jr. - the finest cowboy scientist I've ever known - and in 1997 I received my Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics.

Now, if you're familiar with the process, after receiving your Ph.D. in a hard science you typically do an apprenticeship or two - although they're called postdocs - and I did one of those with Dr. Gene Leys at the Ohio State University College of Dentistry, Department of Periodontology.  Gene was a cool guy, and I really left that postdoc due to my own impending mid life crisis.  It involved a girl, of course, and while I didn't end up with the girl I did end up finding a job in industry - and of all places right back where I started, in Columbus Ohio.  I worked as the scientific product expert for a startup company called LabBook Inc., which ended up failing, and being reborn as Rescentris Ltd.  Well, Rescentris Ltd. lasted for more than a decade, and even after that lived a few brief years longer as Irisnote Inc before finally folding.  I built up quite a lot of experience working with designing, testing, and demonstrating scientific software (electronic laboratory notebooks, if you're really interested).  The product - CERF - was really pretty cool (it even won awards), and even now that Rescentris and Irisnote are gone you can still buy CERF from my buddy Rob Day at Lab-Ally.

After the fourth incarnation of that startup failed I decided it was time to do something really crazy and jump back to academia.  The same friend of mine who pointed out that LabBook Inc. was hiring back in 2000 ended up hiring me to work for him at The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital, where I still am today, doing computational biology research.  I also teach graduate-level bioinformatics courses at The University of Maryland University College (UMUC), and host my own bioinformatics server for my students.

Along the way I was married, divorced, married again, had kids (twin boys, Beowulf and Hiro, now aged 14), divorced again, and am currently engaged again (third time's a charm, right?).

So by now you're asking yourself, if I'm such a geeky scientist, why am I writing a blog about investing?  That's a fantastic question.  My father, John Rumpf, fled Austria after World War II and ended up in Dayton Ohio.  He spent the next 60 years as a toolmaker, worked hard and saved his money, and at the urging of a friend invested it in the stock market.  Luckily his friend knew what he was talking about, and my dad ended up making quite a bit of money through basic dividend investing.  I was fascinated with how "easy" it was to let your money make more money, so once I had some of my own I started investing too.  I wasn't always successful - but I learned a lot along the way.  Ask me sometime about my small investment in Aerial Telecommunications (which ultimately become T-Mobile....).

Anyway, I kept telling my friends how easy it was to make money if you were careful and sharp, and one of them (you know who you are, Jim!) finally told me to stop talking and start blogging.  And that's how it all started....