SciDB Science Advisory Board

Gordon Anderson
Genomics

Gordon Anderson has over 30 years of experience in the development of instrument control systems, high performance data acquisition systems and data management systems. These skills have been applied to the high throughput proteomics research at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The development of hardware and software has enabled advanced instrument control schemes for Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratories (EMSL) state-of-the-art high performance Mass Spectrometers. The proteomics capabilities have been enabled by Gordon's software development efforts in the area of complex spectral analysis and feature detection. Proteomics produces large volumes of multi-dimensional data that must be organized and processed using a combination of commercial software tools and custom designed tools, Gordon assembled a multi-disciplinary team and has lead the development of proteomics data management and analysis efforts at PNNL.

Gordon leads the informatics group at PNNL consisting of 12 staff members responsible for data management and knowledge extraction from the raw data resulting from analysis of biological samples. Gordon holds 2 R&D 100 awards, 7 patents and has authored or coauthored over a 100 journal articles. Gordon received his B.S.E.E. from Washington State University in 1985.

Tim Axelrod
Astronomy

Tim Axelrod is the Data Management Project Scientist for LSST, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. He received his BS in Physics from Caltech in 1969, an MS in Applied Physics from Stanford in 1971, and his PhD in Physics and Astronomy from UC Santa Cruz in 1980. As a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab he was involved in a wide variety of computational physics problems, and turned his attention to data intensive astronomy projects in 1987. After designing and implementing the data processing for a highly parallel satellite tracking system, he went on to key data architect roles in TAOS, an asteroid occultation survey, MACHO, a search for dark matter through microlensing, LBT, the Large Binocular Telescope, and now LSST. MACHO was one of the first optical astronomy projects that was possible only with large scale databases and computing, and that tradition of pushing the edge of data technology for astronomy is now epitomized by LSST.

Chaitan Baru
Environmental Observing Systems

Chaitan Baru is a Distinguished Scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego, where he leads the CloudStor group and is also involved in a number of cyberinfrastructure (CI) projects including, as Project Director of the Geosciences Network (GEON) and CI Lead for the Tropical Ecology, Assessment and Monitoring network (TEAM). He is also co-PI of the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS), and was co-PI of the CI Testbed for the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) while also serving as a member of the founding Senior Management Team of NEON.

Baru's research interests are in large-scale data systems, cloud computing, data integration, and scientific data management. Prior to SDSC, he was at IBM, where he led one of the development teams for DB2 Parallel Edition Version 1 (released Dec 1995). He received his B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and M.E. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Peter Fox
Earth and Environmental Science

Peter Fox is Tetherless World Constellation Chair and Professor of Earth and Environmental Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Previously, he spent17 years at the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research as Chief Computational Scientist. Fox's research specializes in the fields of solar and solar-terrestrial physics, computational and computer science, information technology, and grid-enabled, distributed semantic data frameworks. This research utilizes state-of-the-art modeling techniques, internet-based technologies, including the semantic web, and applies them to large-scale distributed scientific repositories addressing the full life-cycle of data and information within specific science and engineering disciplines as well as among disciplines. Fox is currently PI for the Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory, the Semantically-Enabled Scientific Data Integration, and the Semantic Provenance Capture in Data Ingest Systems projects. Fox has spent over 23 years bridging science and distributed data and information systems to support community activities utilizing use case driven design. Fox leads working groups for: Virtual Observatories for the Electronic Geophysical Year, semantic web for NASA technology infusion as well as the Earth Science Information Partnership federation, is chair of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics Union Commission on Data and Information and the AGU Special Focus Group on Earth and Space Science Informatics, is an associate editor for the Earth Science Informatics journal, is a member of the editorial board for Computers in Geosciences and lead editor for the AGU monograph Virtual Observatories in Geosciences. Fox recently served on International Council for Science's Strategic Committee for Information and Data. Fox also currently serves as President for the not-for-profit Open source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol (OPeNDAP).

http://tw.rpi.edu/wiki/Peter_Fox

Tim Frazier
Fusion

Tim Frazier is senior architect for the Shot Data Systems for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He is responsible for leading the development of the scientific archive, workflow and visualization systems that capture & analyze experimental data produced by experiments conducted at NIF. In addition, he is a member of the architecture team which oversees development of the data-driven laser control system, experimental campaign planning & modeling tools and IT security and infrastructure.

Prior to joining LLNL in 1997, Tim served as Chief Technology Officer at Sunflower Systems, a provider of asset management applications to Department-level Federal Agencies and large government contractors.

Tim holds a BS degree in Computer Science and a BS degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Virginia.

James Frew
Remote Sensing

James Frew is an Associate Professor in the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and a principal investigator in UCSB's Institute for Computational Earth System Science (ICESS).

His research interests lie in the emerging field of environmental informatics, a synthesis of computer, information, and Earth sciences. Trained as a geographer, he has worked in remote sensing, image processing, software architecture, massive distributed data systems, and digital libraries. His current research is focused on geospatial information provenance, discovery, and curation, using remote sensing data products generated by his Environmental Information Laboratory as operational test beds.

Frew currently leads the Earth System Science Server (ES3) project, and serves as President of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners. During the 2005–2006 academic year he was a visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh's Digital Curation Centre.

Dirk Duellmann
High Energy Physics

Since 2008, Dirk Duellmann is a deputy leader of the data management group in CERN's IT department, which provides database services and develops data handling frameworks for the LHC physics community. The group is also responsible for the development of CERN's advanced storage manager (CASTOR) and key data management components (DPM, LFC, FTS, LCG utils) of the LHC computing grid. Until recently Dirk lead the LCG persistency framework development project (2002–2008) and the LCG distributed database deployment project (2004–2008). Before he worked on object and relational databases (RD45 and Espresso projects).

Dirk joint CERN in 1995 after receiving a PhD in high energy physics from the University of Hamburg. Before he worked since 1986 in several software companies on the development of database management systems and database applications.

Todd Halter
Atmospheric Sciences

Todd Halter has over 20 years experience in the fields of Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry. He has through understanding of the data management requirements within atmospheric sciences. Since 1998, Todd has been working on the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program — the largest global change research program supported by the U.S. Department of Energy as a value added products and data system developer and project manager.

Todd has served as a group manager, project manager, system architect, and developer with experience in all aspects of staff and project management, budget and resource management, architecture and system design, coding, testing, installation, and maintenance for several other projects within PNNL.

Todd holds a MS in Computer Science from Washington State University.

Bill Howe
Environmental Modeling

Bill is a Senior Scientist at the eScience Institute at the University of Washington and an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department, also at UW.

From 2003 to 2008, Bill worked directly with environmental modelers at the NSF Science and Technology Center for Coastal Margin Observation and Prediction (CMOP), developing systems and formalisms for querying grid-structured datasets produced by environmental simulations, particularly in oceanography. He earned a Phd in Computer Science from Portland State University in 2006 based on this work.

In 2008, Bill was awarded a Jim Gray seed grant from Microsoft Research for work on managing environmental modeling data. Bill was also awarded a two-year grant from NSF to develop a platform for evaluating ad hoc, long-term climate studies at interactive speeds using an I/O-oriented cluster provided by NSF, Google, and IBM.

Bill participates in standardization and integration efforts for national-scale environmental observation and modeling capabilities, including the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) at NSF, the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) at NOAA, and the Collaborative Research on Oregon Ocean Salmon (ProjectCROOS).

Bill holds a Phd in Computer Science from Portland State University and a Bachelor's degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Georgia Tech.

Michael Godin
Oceanography

Michael Godin's preferred role within the Research division of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) is to be an instigator of new ideas for managing and exploring ocean observatories. Recent projects have included the development collaboration systems for geographically distributed groups of researchers, tools for spatio-temporal data exploration, and operating software for underwater vehicles designed for month-long autonomous missions.

He holds engineering degrees from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (B.S., Mechanical) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.S., Nuclear). He has been building and programming systems since he was a child, and has managed to maintain the innovative and intuitive attitude of a hobbyist towards complex systems, despite his dedication to rigor and well documented designs.

He has worked in the government, industry, and non-profit realms on varied topics including nuclear waste handling robots, environmental risk management, hyper-spectral in-situ ocean sensing, ocean remote-sensing, marine metadata management, and underwater robots.