While Mark Cafferty was a student at Assumption College, a small Catholic school in Worcester, Mass., he found helping with Special Olympics extremely satisfying. After college he continued assisting disabled workers by linking them with training or employers during eight years with the Boston Private Industry Council.

When he met Larry Fitch, CEO of the San Diego Workforce Partnership, at a meeting in Boston, Cafferty mentioned that his wife, Charlene Kakimoto, was in medical school in the Navy and would do her residency in San Diego. When that time came, so did a job for Cafferty as director of business alliances for the Workforce Partnership. Now, four years later, he recently joined Biocom as director of workforce development.

“That job grew out of a grant I had written for Biocom,” Cafferty says of a 2004 $2.5 million grant Biocom received for development of a world class workforce in that industry. Although he is no longer at the Workforce Partnership, he sits on its investment board.

Soon after Cafferty and his wife arrived here, she was called for a seven-month deployment as the senior medical officer with a group of Marines in Iraq. Her absence was “awful,” he says, in that “for three months, I couldn’t speak to her at all.” He wrote to her every night.

Through his work, Cafferty, 34, sits on several committees and boards, including the new Casey Family Foundation Community Partnership Board for Foster Youth. “It’s what I love to do,” he says.

For pleasure, he and his wife like to travel, whether to another continent or for a weekend nearby. They expect to be in San Diego for at least another four years.