Granted

Ok, so if the Fathers' Day pics proved that Josh is a great dad, then Friday reminded me to tell you that he's also a great doctor. We didn't always know if this would be true.

During med school, Josh spent hours at our tiny kitchen table, laboring over his decisions past and present. Was his passion for computers going to waste? Should he quit med school to get into the booming tech industry? If he stuck with medicine, which specialty? Nothing seemed to utilize all his strengths.

Until the second month of his last year of med school. He decided to spend a week shadowing a Vandy internist so he could choose between internal medicine (adults) and pediatrics (kids). In God's providence, that internist is also a biomedical informatics researcher. "Biomedical informatics" is literally "a discipline at the intersection of information science, computer science, and health care." Kabam.

Not only had Josh suddenly been introduced to an emerging field that perfectly fit his skills, he was also studying at the top institution in that field. Vanderbilt has the largest Biomedical Informatics department in the country.

Six years later, Josh had finished his residency in internal medicine and fellowship in biomedical informatics. He took a job at Vanderbilt, seeing patients, teaching, and researching ways computers can improve healthcare.

Three years after that, he applied for his first major federal grant (he's part of many other grants, but this stands in a class of its own). An R01, and a practical necessity for any tenure application. Josh's application was reviewed over a year ago, given a great score, and then shelved. That's right, nothing. No word. Every few months, he'd check in with the committee, but with a major budget battle going on in Washington, it didn't look good.

Which brings me back to Friday. He got it. He GOT IT! Woohoo!

Someday I'll tell you more about the ground-breaking research Josh is doing, how many lives it saves, and how good he is with patients and programmers alike, but today, let me just tell you: I am so glad the U.S. government finally got off its tush and recognized that this guy deserves this grant for this work. Because it is amazing. And so is he.

(Celebrating at Cheesecake Factory.)