Ross Naylor, Senior Algorithm Development Engineer
I was diagnosed with T1D in 2005. I’d been sick off and on my senior year of high school, but it was in my first semester of college that I was hospitalized and found out I had T1D. I have always loved math and science. I was planning to major in finance and had a full scholarship even, but I remember this moment after diagnosis when I was finally feeling better. I was looking at a syringe and feeling so appreciative of the engineers who got us here. I decided to transfer and applied for a biomedical and electrical engineering major at USC to pursue these career endeavors and graduated three years later.
I was determined to find a way to work in diabetes. I took a position with Medtronic in 2009 and found a speech that Lane Desborough had given, which made me eager to work with him. In Lane, I found somebody with whom I could talk passionately about improving diabetes care and we began working on Nightscout together after hours. Because of my job in industry, I contributed pretty quietly to the project, but I am the developer who got all of our Nightscout code and put it out there on GitHub, cleaned it up, branded the friendly owl that helps keep watch, helped make it user friendly…and now thousands of people have benefited from it today. Being a part of that community has changed my life.
Now I feel like I have the opportunity to do so much more. With the open source projects, we can move quickly to a point, but not everybody can do what we can do. Not everyone has access to these devices and can make them work together. I believe in Bigfoot because we’re able to focus on making something robust enough for everybody, for everyone and every case. It’s not only challenging, but it’s what you’re supposed to do.