Profile

Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Wolters Kluwer Financial Services

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By Katie Ford

“I took one class at a time; we met twice a week in the evenings,” he says. “The class content was half theoretical, half project work. I'd typically spend weekends doing the projects, but I sometimes had to squeeze homework into the workday. It was unavoidable.”

Levine also had to sit out for two semesters because of a big assignment at work. All the sacrifice was worth it, however, when opportunity came knocking.

In 1995, Levine received a cold call from a recruiter for the Thomson Corporation. The CTO was looking for someone with a background in computational linguistics who had experience running an applied research and development program similar to the one Levine was running for TASC.

“They were having a difficult time finding individuals who could understand the business side of things,” Levine recalls. “I was finishing up my master's degree and I knew how to transfer technology research into production use, because that was very much the agenda at our lab—highly technical applied technology transferred to government-sponsored programs or the private sector.”

Most of Levine's contemporaries had doctoral degrees and were published, but because he had experience moving research into production and managing a P&L, he was offered the job.

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