Who is this strange man?

Vince Needham was born in (of all places) Lawrence, KS, during the Eisenhower administration. This was in the dark ages before color television, microwaves or touch-tone phones. He was raised in Leavenworth, KS, where he managed to survive 12 years of Catholic education with only minor trauma to his critical thinking skills. He was paroled to Kansas State University, where he eventually earned a Masters in Physics, learned to build particle accelerators and met his first personal computer. He liked it all so much that he just stayed.

Professionally he splits his time between accelerator-based physics and research computing support. He was part of the team that built and operated the JRM Lab's superconducting linac. In the course of that project he wrote data acquisiton (DAQ) and process control programs, and created the lab's first web page (just as a exercise in that newfangled HTML stuff). Since then, he's absorbed more and more computing administration and DAQ responsibilities, and become the lab's webmaster.

When not working on the above, Vince is likely to be hunting lost ancestors. His father's Needham clan, being conscientious New England record keepers, is now well known back to around 1640. His mother's Simmons family was a more free spirited band springing out of Virginia around 1800; they're a more challenging bunch to pin down. Vince also reads too much, and has programmed his PVR to watch too much science fiction and anime on his behalf.

If you're still reading this and want to get into contact with Mr. Needham for whatever reason, try: