Interactional schmoozing or contributory conversation?

I got a chance to talk to a regular member of this team, a junior faculty from EE just before today's meeting. He was the one who asked me my professional interests and career path at the last meeting. We ran into each other at the door entrance and walked together to the boardroom. Along the way, he related his entrepreneurial engagement with his own company handling technology licensing and selling biosensors. I told him stories about the collaboration between EE and Physics at SLAC, partly because the article I read is still fresh in my memory drawer and partly because I assumed it paved the road for his collaboration for this team doing Biophysics stuff. He shared his interest and vision in exploring the intersecting spaces between Biology and EE. Right now the two areas are largely taken to be far afield to have any kinship whatsoever. His company is using an analytic tool in EE called frequency domain analysis to analyze the dynamics of cells and membranes and population of cells based on high frequency impetus. His vision is that fostering a stronger bond between the two disparate disciplines would benefit both disciplines, which is exactly what M. Crow strives to achieve.

This conversation is enlightening to my study. Then I realized how little talking/sharing is allowed in the boardroom. Scientists and grad students are highly focused on presenting their work progress that seldom do they talk about stuff considered to be unrelated/peripherally related to the problems at hand. To me, I think what this guy just told me is absolutely relevant to the meeting as his entrepreneurial acumen and trans-disciplinary endeavor partly shape his presence at the meeting. Recall that I met him at the BioD entrance with backpack and everything, which suggested that he probably is not a regular dweller at BioD. I'd like to know more about how he's involved with this team, assuming that I have any luck to hunt him down in the future.