Daniel Biank earned his bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from Valparaiso University. Immediately following graduation he started on the Edison Engineering Development Program at GE Medical Systems, GE’s medical equipment and service business, based in Milwaukee. This two-year Edison program allows new engineers to take product and leadership classes while working short-term job assignments throughout the company to gain technical breadth and leadership experience. Soon after graduation Daniel married Erin, his college sweetheart, in May 2001. That same year he also began pursuing his master’s degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Daniel has had the opportunity to serve in a variety of engineering positions within GE Medical Systems. While on the Edison program he started in Service Engineering, defining and implementing the global service strategy for the LightSpeed line of CAT scanners. He proceeded to X-ray to develop the digital portion of the next-generation user console for the X-Ray product line. While in X-ray he also co-developed a course for VHDL, a hardware description language, which was later added to the Edison curriculum. He and Erin then relocated to Chicago so that Erin could complete her bachelor’s degree at Valparaiso University. Daniel worked within GE Medical Systems’ Information Technology unit and developed the software to include the mammography workflow on the Centricity image archive platform. Daniel and Erin returned to Milwaukee where he took a leadership role leading a software team through the launch of iTrak globally across GE Medical Systems. iTrak is an internal issue tracking system resolutions for FDA compliance and reporting with a 12,000+ user-base within GE. Following the Edison program Daniel took his present position designing hardware for medical MRI scanners. Daniel also continues to be involved within the community volunteering for the FIRST robotics program, participating in Habitat for Humanity and speaking to promote engineering at local schools.

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Balancing Work with Life

Life is the sum total of our experiences. As long as we are applying effort to accomplish something, work is part of our experience and therefore part of life. While we always will work, we do have a choice about what it is we are working on and towards. Work may have many daily demands. However, in the long term to achieve balance with work and life it is critical that we are working towards things we value.

Balancing Work With Life — discusses the process of evaluating work as a component of life and ensuring that it is rewarding to us personally and not a detrimental aspect of our lives. The presentation shares my own experiences, decisions and errors as a young engineer starting out in industry while beginning a marriage and continuing education. It is important to maintain control and perspective of the work we commit to do that our life may reflect the things that are truly important to us.

3/28/06