Thomas P. Caruso

Thomas P. Caruso, an entrepreneur, pharmacologist, biomedical informaticist, research program developer, software project manager, and management consultant, was born in 1952 to parents living in Wyckoff, New Jersey. He has two brothers, Frank L. Caruso and James J. Caruso. His father was a leading dentist in Wyckoff, and both parents received honorable discharge from the Army in 1946 after active duty in Europe during World War II . His parents were married in France on V-J Day.
Education
Caruso obtained a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1974 with a double major in biochemistry and biology. While in college Tom initially pursued a pre-medicine program, but was unable to get the personal motivation for remaining in this path. Late in his sophomore year at Pittsburgh his organic chemistry teacher suggested, because he had done exceptionally well in his class, that he consider a career in chemistry, and if not chemistry at least biochemistry, and so Caruso decided to follow this advice. His coursework also included enough psychology that he decided to complete a psychology minor by attending Fairleigh Dickenson University in the summer of 1974 after finishing his degree at the University of Pittsburgh. One of the psychology courses he had taken at Pittsburgh was Physiological Psychology which, in addition to the book written by Floyd Bloom called the Biochemical Basis of Neuropharmacology interested him in pursuing graduate education in this field.
Between 1975 and 1979 Tom Caruso completed the requirements for a doctoral degree in pharmacology from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Caruso was trained under the mentoring of Akira E. Takemori who studied the mechanism of opiate action. Caruso did his doctoral thesis on the characterization of an irreversible narcotic agonist and antagonist pair called chloroxymorphamine and chlornaltrexamine, respectively. His work showed not only that these compounds bound irreversibly and specifically to an opiate receptor, but also that these compounds had long-lasting narcotic agonist and antagonist effects. While in this program, he completed in depth training in biochemistry, which he applied in the laboratory by using one chlornaltrexamine to specifically label the receptor and complete one of the first efforts to purify the opiate receptor. This work included publications in the Journal of Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics, Life Sciences, the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry

, and Science.
Immediately following his doctoral work, he continued pursuing his interests in understanding the biochemical basis of drug action by working in the labs of William H. Frey, II and Susan E. Nicols who worked in the Department of Psychiatry Research in the St. Paul-Ramsey Medical Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. This work included assisting with the demonstration of the stability of adenylate and guanylate cyclase in rat and human brain tissue, as well as work examining and purifying a small molecule which modulated GTPase activity in human and rat brain. His work also included studies of enzyme activity in Alzheimer brain tissue.
Deciding that he no longer wanted to work in a laboratory, and with great interest in the developing biotechnology industry in the early 80's, Caruso decided to pursue a masters in management (a.k.a. an MBA) degree from Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He completed this degree in 1984 after writing a thesis with Mark Harsh and under the mentoring of Edward B. Roberts on Joint Ventures in the Cable and Videotex Industry.
In 2010 Caruso obtained certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI) as a for 25 years of project management experience verified by an exam testing knowledge of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). Caruso had been associated with PMI in 1991 when he made a presentation at an annual PMI meeting about a structured approach to software project management. The same structured approach was later used in the PMBOK.
Career
The Early Entrepreneurial Years
In 1983 over the summer between school years at MIT, Caruso worked as an intern in Zero Stage Capital a venture capital company at the beginning of its investment operations only two years after its founding by Edward B. Roberts, Paul Kelley and others. It was here he came in contact with companies in the "videotex" industry including [http://books.google.com/books?idWTAEAAAAMBAJ&pgPA25&lpgPA25&dqgeneral+videotex+corporation&sourcebl&otsoybChGolJT&sigyCh8NqxSJfw7nAhkL5tCXluEjlw&hlen&ei7brjTYCAAuH20gGp4PSMBw&saX&oibook_result&ctresult&resnum6&ved0CFMQ6AEwBQ#vonepage&qgeneral%20videotex%20corporation&f=false General Videotex], the company that built the Delphi network that was eventually bought by News Corp. and decided to pursue his interests by completing a masters thesis on this subject (see Education). In this process he met Samuel Berkman, the program manager at AT&T who had brought the to the U.S. from Canada[http://books.google.com/books?idtT0EAAAAMBAJ&pgPA1&lpgPA1&dqSam+Berkman+AT%26T&sourcebl&otsVCLmYfjcor&sigS-NfE-3Q6LLw2KMB0vqV94UvlTA&hlen&eiuLzjTYuWPJCugQeS8bSQBg&saX&oibook_result&ctresult&resnum5&ved0CE4Q6AEwBA#vonepage&qSam%20Berkman%20AT%26T&f=false%20], who led the ATT-CBS videotex trial in Ridgewood, NJ, and who was building various partnerships for AT&T with various media companies to pilot videotex around the country. With Berkman, Caruso put together a management team, wrote a business plan and sought funding from major investment companies for a company called MetroView Corporation that planned to build kiosk-based information services in 20 major cities around the country. However, before being able to raise funds, the pilot projects being run around the country, most visibly ViewTron were failing to produce winning models for videotex services to the general consumer, and though MetroView was focused on a services for travelers investors failed to materialize.
While seeking investors for MetroView Corp., Caruso met Ira Samuels, a nephew of David Sarnoff and inventor of the private pay telephone of American Phonemeter Corporation. Samuels had developed technology that could measure, on analog phones, when someone would answer their phone until the time they hung up, a technology that he could implement in a small amount of memory on microprocessors in a pay phone, which was quite different from the multiple Bell-system VAX computers required to run a similar analysis at that time. Samuels actually had an information service planned for his private pay phones, and he was intriqued by the idea of using videotex on his phones; however, Samuels had left American Phonemeter to develop his own investments, and Caruso had met him while he was still covered under his non-compete agreement, so they decided to focus on other business opportunities in telecommunications. Together with Edward Ladenheim, a retired employee of Sperry Corporation where he had been project manager for U.S. spy ships and the Apollo satellite tracking system, and most recently a red team member for the new Global Positioning System (GPS), they started an investment company called Incutech Corporation which would focus on investments in telecommunications. Two efforts were notable: (1) an effort to turn around a key telephone system manufacturer, taking it through Chapter 11, and (2) an effort to create a hotel room telecontrol console. After substantial investment of time and research of the opportunity, neither of these were deemed to be worthy investments.
As the term of Samuels' non-compete ran out, the team decided to pursue a venture they called ViewPhone which would combine the private pay phone technology with videotex technology. The team created a product design and business plan that convinced a major investment bank on Wall Street to give Incutech a letter of intent to provide their best efforts to raise a $20 million investment. Samuels turned the offer down, so Caruso decided he would pursue other opportunities.
The Software Project Management Years
In early 1989 he took a position as a software project manager for National Computer Systems (NCS) Financial Systems Division (FSD, since 1996 part of SunGard Data Systems). Caruso managed software projects, led the budgeting process, developed a state-of-the-art project management methodology for NCS FSD, turned around a bank software implementation project, and implemented a Lotus Notes sales system that International Data Systems estimated had a 176% return on investment. Caruso would remain with NCS until 1994 when he left as part of a major layoff due to difficulties NCS had in meeting the requirements for the new UlTrust product they had been developing for Bankers Trust.
For the first two years following his departure from NCS Caruso got served as a manager of a startup Lotus Notes add-on company called Corporate Image Software. Though they were able to increase sales they were unable to get sales to a point that would support the business, so Caruso left to pursue Lotus Notes and Excel development consulting opportunities. In this time he enhanced a third party Lotus Notes sales management systems for NYNEX, built a Lotus Notes support tracking systems for Applix, and created an Excel sales tool for Ameritek.
Research Program Development: The Economic Development Years
Throughout these years Caruso had been, off and on looking for ways to get back into healthcare, pharmaceutical or biotechnology markets. The pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies he approached were looking for people with fewer credentials, or, because they had followed a more traditional path through academia or industry, the right type of experience for the jobs they needed filled. A position at Virginia Tech for an industry program development specialist in their Office of the Vice Provost for Research ended up being Caruso's chance to jump back to an academic environment from a lucrative, but less satisfying software development career in Boston, MA. In this case Caruso was given the job of developing and managing sponsored relationships with industry. He worked with companies interested in working with faculty mostly in the College of Engineering, but also in the Colleges of Arts & Sciences, Architecture, Education, Agriculture, Forestry & Natural Resources, Human Resources, and Veterinary Medicine. The great majority of these activities focused on computer scientists, chemists, and electrical and computer engineers. Caruso also pursued an effort to build a new program in the College of Engineering focused on biomedical engineering. Since more than half of his funding came from Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology (CIT), these efforts were also oriented towards supporting the economic development needs of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
During these years Caruso worked with others to:
# Win funding of $2M from CIT for an Internet Technology Innovation Center
# Lead a regular Industry Opportunities Open House event at Virginia Tech's College of Engineering
# Host a major SBIR/STTR conference involving Virginia's Governor and newly appointed Secretary of Technology
Research Program Development: The Major Initiative Years
With clear understanding that the big dollars for an academic institution were associated with government grants, and for Virginia Tech this meant both State and Federal grants, Caruso moved off funding from CIT and began focusing on developing major research initiatives at Virginia Tech. In particular, he was able to work with faculty already defining a Food, Nutrition, and Health "Cross-Cutting" Initiative to bring together four colleges around a single five year proposal for funding needed to develop the Cooperative Extension and Agricultural Experiment Station organizations. This effort drew on Caruso's expertise working with industry since he first put together a steering committee made up of nine people representing major areas of the food and nutrition industries.

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