Chris Dwan: Brief Professional Biography
I started out in Computer Science at the University of Michigan. In graduate
school, also in Ann Arbor, I studied Artificial Intelligence. During this time
I worked as a systems administrator, making Unix and Linux systems do tricks.
My first real job was with the former Environmental Research Institute
of Michigan (ERIM). That company is no more, having been consumed by
Veridian and subsequently extruded into General Dynamics. My work was
in algorithm development, helping to distinguish between tanks and trucks
in various sorts of sensor data, mostly radar and infrared. I also worked
a little bit on detecting landmines and unexploded ordinance.
After that, I moved to Minnesota, and started working in a bioinformatics
group. It quickly became obvious to me that a developer with no understanding
of the underlying science is useless, particularly in a research
organization. Therefore, I took advantage of the free tuition to take at
least one graduate level biology course every term I was working for the
University. Through a combination of aptitude and willingness, I took
responsibility for more than a few servers, clusters, databases, and web
pages.
Now, I'm a Principal Consultant with The BioTeam. My work is amazingly
variable and a tremendous amount of fun. I spend most of my time
parallelizing and optimizing software for bioinformatics and genomics.
I developed the web services (SOAP and WSDL) interface to BioTeam's product
"iNquiry." I do training both in general bioinformatics and in the specifics
of using our software, and I have gotten to do contract research and benchmarking.
All my contact info is available under the "people" link on the BioTeam web page.