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‘‘It was a great leap of faith,” said Lynch, 55. ‘‘But I had done technical writing and actually it turned out to be a pretty good fit.”

He learned the management and business development end of the business so well he eventually rose through the executive ranks. In the fall, he was picked to succeed the much-respected Mary Frances leMat as the new president and CEO of an employee-owned company with annual revenues of more than $115 million.

The Business Gazette talked to Lynch recently about his company’s mission and his transition from academia to the boardroom.

What are your priorities for the company?

We’ve identified six areas that are leveraging the capabilities we have. Some of the more interesting ones are in the biomedical field, doing support for biomedical things around the globe.

We’ve won a contract with the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] to support their efforts if there’s an outbreak of avian flu in Southeast Asia. We’ll be helping them deploy their teams.

We’ve done international trials for [the National Institutes of Health] for a long time and that’s grown ... and we now have other HIV⁄AIDS programs we support around the world. What we recognize is public health is a global issue, we’re not looking at it from [just] a domestic perspective, and that’s a big step for a small company.

You’ve done a lot of traveling for SSS?

Yes ... Kampala, Ivory Coast, Amsterdam, Berlin, Yokohama, Vancouver, Barcelona, Durban ... I’ve had to travel to oversee our support on our various contracts.

I was in Uganda in May. We have eight staff people there, Ugandan natives who get support from our office. I went there to see what our business opportunities are there. There was one clinic I visited where they see hundreds if not thousands of [AIDS] patients a day ... then the electricity goes off and everybody has to stop working ... data entry, everything. It’s amazing working in a resource-challenged environment.

What’s the toughest thing about taking over for Mary Frances?

I don’t know yet — we’ll find out [smiles]. Actually, I’ve found that the hardest part is figuring, ‘How do we fill the gaps for the next level of leaders?’ That’s what we’ve spent more time on. It’s keeping all of these forward-looking things in mind as you still run the business and still have to answer the questions that have to be answered, and make sure projects are on track and clients are happy.

So it’s no single thing. The trick, I think, is more strategy and getting in the right place and getting our credentials known, ahead of the curve.

And I think we’ve made strides in that recently, by hiring people who are better at doing that than I ever would be, people who have more direct experience in marketing and sales.

Originally you thought you’d be an English professor all your life?

Yes. My mother was a grade school teacher, and my father was a mathematician and industrial engineer. Actually I was always much better in math when I was growing up than in language ... and I think that’s helped me in this job.

But I had an older brother who went into the math end, so I decided I needed to be an English major, and be an English professor. My specialty was the British novel, particularly the 17th- and 18th-century influences of France and Spain on the English novel, and I did research on Fielding and Voltaire, Cervantes. And I had a great time while I was at Virginia Tech. It was publish or perish ... and I did both: I published and perished [laughs].

What happened?

I still love the teaching, but the reality of teaching at that level is that the priority is on politics and there’s a lot of stress because you’re not evaluated on the basis of what you’re paid to do ... [and] instead on issues like grants, etc.

In my last year there I worked as a consultant for a small research-and-development company in Radford, Va. When I was ready to leave Virginia Tech I took a full-time job as [the company’s] publications director, where really I was proposal manager, and I was a technical editor and publications manager. And then they had some struggles, so they laid me off. So I started looking around and we decided we wanted to move to this area because we wanted to be close to the arts and the cultural and historical things that are around here, and I put a résumé in here.

Social and Scientific was dealing with HIV⁄AIDS, and fiber optics and laser measurements and material science and optics. I said, ‘‘I don’t know anything about any of those things, but what I know how to do is to write and to help people write better.” And they were looking to do a better job in preparing and developing proposals.

At the time we had just graduated from the [Small Business Administration’s] 8(a) program, in 1988, and [when] a company like ours graduates from 8(a), your first task is to figure out how you can compete in the non-set-aside world. And of course once you do that you have to compete with big companies.

So we spent five or six years replacing business and re-competing the things we’d kept. We have some contracts we’ve kept since the very beginning of the company, for 28 years.

The longest is with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Policy. It’s data analysis, statistical programming work and that’s kind of the bread-and-butter work that we’ve done. Basically it’s to help the government to do the analysis of this large complex health survey that they do called the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey.

It’s a rolling longitudinal sample survey of [several] dimensions of health care, including insurers and long-term care facilities, residential facilities, people in all kind of facilities.”

So what was the learning curve like — English lit to what you’re doing now?

Well, I think that what’s been interesting for me is I’ve always had the ability to frame things, to understand how things fit together without necessarily knowing how the individual parts work.

I don’t know anything really about statistics, or programming or biomedical research or clinical trials ... but I knew what the clients were asking and what their objectives were, and the task is then to make sure we’re able to write proposals that convince our clients that we’re meeting their goals.

How did the move from Bethesda happen?

In 2001 we had an office in Rockville that had 100 people, and we had 150 in downtown Bethesda and 20 in Gaithersburg. Since our lease was running out in the Rockville office and our strategy was to get everyone in one place, we wanted to do it in Bethesda. But at that time the Bethesda market was lucrative enough on the seller’s side we couldn’t find a deal and so we started looking elsewhere.

Finally our broker brought us over to Silver Spring to look at this building and it turned out to be a good deal for us. As we looked into it, it was clear that the real question was, ‘‘Was Silver Spring going to redevelop or not?”

At the time it looked like there was enough commitment from companies to make it work, but it was a question for us, for our employees. Being close to Metro was very important. We had a large percentage of staff who lived in the northwest part of the county and they were very anxious, that this building was going to be impossible to get to, and is it safe?

As it turned out we didn’t lose anybody because of the move. When people got here they liked it. And Silver Spring’s a friendlier place in many ways, [than Bethesda]. I think it’s more laid-back, and certainly now, thriving ... you can have almost anything you want right here.

Position: President and CEO, Social and Scientific Systems Inc., an employee-owned company in Silver Spring with about 500 employees and with offices in Durham, N.C., and Africa. SSS services include computer systems and data analyis; logistical and systems support for HIV⁄AIDS clinical trials and conferences; and program monitoring and evaluation service. Clients include the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Food and Drug Administration, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Education: Bachelor’s and master’s degrees, English, John Carroll University; doctorate, English, University of Texas.

Residence: Chantilly, Va.

Family: Wife, Marilyn.

Organizations: Executive committee and board of directors, Tech Council of Maryland; executive committee and board of directors, Professional Services Council; Leadership Washington.

Hobbies: Cleveland Indians fan; reading; classical music; theater.