Company: Leadership
BioTeam is actively involved with our customers, our community, and our industry’s future. Each individual plays an important role in contributing to the advancement of informatics as a tool to enable great science to happen.
Ari E. Berman, Ph.D.
Senior Scientific Consultant
Contact: ari@bioteam.net
Toll-Free: 877-246-2992 x110
Direct: 512-366-8194
IM: ari@bioteam.net (Gtalk), bermanari (AOL), arieberman (yahoo)
Ari began his High Performance Computing career working for the Computer Science department at the University of Texas at Austin as an undergraduate in Biology/Zoology. While there, he helped design and build several commodity medium-scale clusters, as well as deploy, integrate and maintain large networks of mixed architectures. During this time, he became an expert in Perl and shell scripting, learned about parallel programming techniques, and deployed several web-based interactive programs. He then entered graduate school at UT and received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology with concentration in Neuroscience and Bioinformatics in 2005. In the following two postdoctoral fellowships at UCSF and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Ari gained a lot of laboratory experience in mouse model development and neurodegenerative diseases as well as a great deal of direct bioinformatics experience. During this time he continued developing and maintaining HPC infrastructure to assist in his research. Recently, Ari has gained expertise in disaster recovery, high-availability, data security, and centralized high-performance, high-volume storage systems. Ari’s career goals are to seamlessly combine his HPC/hardware infrastructure skills with his biology/bionformatics and software development skills to provide a mechanism to support his hobby of brewing beer for BioTeam.
Anushka Brownley, MS
Contact: anushka@bioteam.net
Toll-Free: 877-246-2992 x108
Direct: 617-755-7060
Anushka studied Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University before receiving her Masters in Bioinformatics from Georgia Institute of Technology. She has spent the last ten years working in NGS with a focus on building bioinformatics pipelines for data management, analysis, and interpretation of genome sequence data. At the J. Craig Venter Institute, she used open-source and proprietary code to implement both production and customized systems to manage and analyze data from targeted re-sequencing of human, bacterial, viral, and synthetic genomes. She then worked at Complete Genomics doing bioinformatics analysis of whole human genome sequence data to help develop the internal genome assembly processes and final product for the sequencing-as-a-service company. Subsequently, Anushka transitioned to Product Management to spearhead the Complete Genomics Cloud project and also managed their open-source analysis software tool suite. She is particularly interested in understanding the broad range of scientific computational needs and building relevant and efficient solutions that produce actionable information.
Chris Dagdigian
Founding Partner and Director of Technology
Contact: chris@BioTeam.net
Toll-free: 877.246.2992 x103
Direct: 866.957.9996
Formerly of Blackstone Computing and Genetics Institute, Dagdigian specializes in research computing and infrastructure technology issues in the life sciences. A supporter of free software and open standards for life science research, he is a founding member of the Bioperl Project, co-founder of the Bioclusters mailing list and serves on the board of directors as Treasurer of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation. While at Blackstone Dagdigian was project manager and technical lead for the creation and integration of the Vertex Pharmaceutical VAMPIRE cluster, which replaced an existing Top500 supercomputer used for cutting edge discovery research and informatics. Dagdigian received his bachelor’s degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Biotechnology and occasionally finds the time to continue his graduate coursework at Harvard Extension School.
Stan Gloss
Founding Partner and Chief Executive Officer
Contact: stan@bioteam.net
iChat : stan_gloss@mac.com
Toll-free: 877-246-2992 x101
Direct: 866-957-9994
Fax: 866-957-9994
Stan Gloss joined with founding partners Van Etten and Dagdigian to form BioTeam following his tenure in business development with AVAKI Corporation, a pioneer in global grid software solutions. At Blackstone Computing, a computing and IT consulting company for scientists, Gloss led the sales initiative that launched the company in the life sciences market. Gloss earned his MS at the University of Buffalo and was a department chairman and faculty member at Quinnipiac University.
Adam Kraut
Principal Investigator
Contact: kraut@bioteam.net
Toll-free: 877-246-2992 x107
Direct: 724-582-4309
Adam Kraut trained in Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He went on to study Computational Biology at Carnegie Mellon University. As a researcher at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing, he developed new methods for protein structure prediction to compete in multiple rounds of CASP. While at the PSC he also contributed to core projects in biomolecular simulation, enzyme design, and multi-scale modeling. In addition to high-performance computing support and software development, Kraut brings practical experience in structural bioinformatics and macromolecular modeling to the BioTeam.
Aaron Kitzmiller
Senior Scientific Consultant
Contact: aaron@bioteam.net
Toll-free: 877-246-2992 x109
Direct: 888-334-7673
Aaron’s 15 years in the development of scientific software began during his Neurosciences PhD at the University of North Carolina, but quickly turned toward genomics and bioinformatics. While working first in the pharmaceutical industry and later in next gen sequencing companies, he’s developed solutions within many of the major threads of the last decade of bioinformatics (EST mining; genome and Affy array annotation; analysis and execution frameworks; text mining; chemical and biological data integration; short read analysis) in a variety of technological contexts (Java GUIs; Oracle and MySQL database systems; SMP machines; 3 tiered Web architectures; compute clusters; command line tools; Web 2.0; cloud computing). His biggest pleasure is in the development of simple software tools that make analysis and data accessible to the growing number of scientists that can no longer get by on Excel alone.
Brian Osborne, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator
Contact: briano@bioteam.net
Toll-free: 877-246-2992 x106
Direct: 845-314-0110
Brian Osborne specializes in informatics and next-generation sequencing. He brings a deep understanding of molecular biology and bioinformatics and has collaborated extensively with biologists, chemists, and software developers in academia and pharma.
Osborne studied the molecular biology of the yeast Saccharomyces at MIT and did post-doctoral work on plant genetics and genomics at UC Berkeley. Subsequently he was a lead bioinformaticist for the group that sequenced and annotated Arabidopsis chromosome 1. He has been Director of Information Technology at OSI Pharmaceuticals, a Group Leader of Bioinformatics at Cadus Pharmaceuticals, and CTO at Cognia Corporation. At his own consulting company he worked on a variety of open source and commercial projects, with an emphasis on data integration, technical documentation, and data visualization. He is a long-time core contributor to the open source community, including the Bioperl bioinformatics toolkit and the Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD).
Simon Twigger, PhD
Senior Scientific Consultant
Contact: simon@bioteam.net
Toll-free: 877-246-2992 x111
Tel: 303-991-0459
Simon Twigger specializes in building software that is actually useable by Scientists. He has a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Nottingham in the UK and worked on Ubiquitin and related proteins for his postdoctoral work at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. His growing interest in software development led him into Bioinformatics and he joined Prof. Howard Jacob’s group at the Medical College developing software for genomic mapping projects and became a faculty member in 2001. His research focused around genomics and genome databases, he was a principle investigator on a number of prominent bioinformatic projects – the Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD), the Rat Genome Database, the Gene Ontology Consortium, the National Center for Biomedical Ontology – along with directing the bioinformatics components for the MCW NHLBI National Proteomics Center and the MCW Center of Excellence in Genomics Science. Dr Twigger’s research group focused on promoting emerging software development tools such as Ruby on Rails and cloud computing and his group published the first example of a cloud-based analysis platform for proteomics in 2009. For three years prior to leaving MCW in 2011 he was the Biomedical Informatics Key Function Director for the nascent South Eastern Wisconsin Clinical and Translational Science Institute. In recent years he has been building Ruby on Rails applications for such things as online education, legal research and aviation training.
William Van Etten, Ph.D.
Founding Partner and Principal Investigator
Contact: Bill@BioTeam.net
Toll-free: 877.246.2992 x102
Direct: 866.957.9995
iChat: williamvanettenphd@mac.com
Van Etten contributes the perspective of a biologist in helping BioTeam’s academic, government, biotech and pharma clients solve their computer-aided research problems. His mission to provide “ease-of-use” to scalable research computing is expressed through his contribution to the development of BioTeam’s iNquiry software product.
Van Etten received his PhD in Genetics at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Following his graduate research, Van Etten was Senior Software Engineer at the MIT/Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research where he contributed to the genetic mapping of the rat, and was the Head of Informatics for the Mouse Radiation Hybrid Mapping Project as well as Whitehead’s contribution to the SNP Consortium. Van Etten took these high-throughput computing (HTC) research skills to Blackstone Computing as Principal Bioinformaticist where he designed, built and configured HTC environments to support computer-aided research for many academic, biotech, and pharmaceutical institutions.
