Intro:
Simon works with organizations to help them identify and address the broad challenges impacting modern biomedical data science – FAIR data, data management, use of the cloud, sustainability of data resources, and enabling ethical and responsible AI. He was an early pioneer in the cloud, with his group publishing one of the first papers to use the Amazon cloud for biomedical research in 2009. At BioTeam, he has built PaaS applications on AWS, variant annotation pipelines (that led to a 2017 Nature Neuroscience paper on GCP, and supported the NIH STRIDES program to help move data platforms onto the cloud. He has led projects to outline the goals for national data ecosystems and define the needs for large-scale biomedical search and data discovery, as well as broad initiatives to enable research IT at federal institutions, biotech and pharma, research hospitals, and academic medical centers.
Simon’s practice uses approaches from design and systems thinking combined with a strong emphasis on visual communication to create effective holistic solutions to his client’s BioIT challenges.
Focus Areas:
- Strategic Planning
- Organizational Assessments
- Biomedical data resources
- FAIR Data, Data Sharing, Data Asset Sustainability
- AI/ML, LLMs
- Knowledge management, knowledge graphs
- UX and user-centered systems design
- Cloud
Tools:
- Amazon Web Services
- AWS Cloud Formation
- Google Cloud Platform
- Google Compute Engine, Google BigQuery
- Ansible
- Docker
- Tableau
- Ruby, Objective C, Javascript, Perl
- Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment
Scientific Areas:
- Biochemistry
- Clinical and Translational Science
- Genome Databases
- Genomics
- Model Organisms
- Biomedical Ontologies
- Semantic web technologies
- Proteomics
Background
Simon 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. His 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 MCW’s CTSA center, the South Eastern Wisconsin Clinical and Translational Science Institute.
Personal Interests:
Simon maintains a popular site for Ham Radio education, an iPhone/iPad app for morse code practice, has a rather underused pilot license and tries to spend as much time as possible on the slopes, trails, and rivers of Colorado.
