I joined the bioinformatics group at Genetics Institute in August 1995 just a few months after getting my undergraduate degree from WPI. Dr. David Merberg was my first supervisor and was the one responsible for triggering and supporting my interests in computational biology and technical computing

My post-college plan was to pursue a straight scientific career in bioinformatics or computational biology. It was only after Dr. Merberg let me teach myself Perl on company time did I start getting drawn towards scientific software development. I wrote small pieces of code to automate the boring parts of my job (analyzing cDNA sequences) and shared them with people in my group who encouraged me to take my one-off scripts and turn them into a straightforward pipeline that could be used by everyone.

Those initial cheesy perl scripts, CGI's and parsers ended up becoming the company's first high-throughput analysis pipeline. Soon enough our group was looking to purchase bigger Unix hardware. Once again Dr. Merberg let me get deeply involved with things that I was wildly unqualified for on paper and I ended up helping to purchase compute servers and storage arrays. Once the new hardware arrived I was hooked - building out and managing the technical computing infrastructure for our group consumed more and more of my time.

The immeasurable amount of value that the life science research community has gained from freely available software cemented my views regarding open source and led me to volunteer my own time and effort as a member of the BioPerl Project and the Open Bioinformatics Foundation.

As part of a promotion in 1998 I was formally taken off the company scientific career ladder and was given an IT-style title. This was also about the time that I started thinking that I could focus my career towards being a generalist or "bioinformatics hybrid" - a person who was not really an expert in any one field but had skills and practical experience spanning several disciplines.

From 1998-2000 I spent most of my time working on the scientific and technical computing infrastructure used by various scientists involved in bioinformatics, genomics and basic discovery research. I also proved without a doubt that I am essentially a generalist and infrastructure geek at heart.

The desire to concentrate on scientific infrastructure projects combined with fears of growing too complacent and comfortable after five years at Genetics Institute lead me to accept a position with Blackstone Computing (Formally Blackstone Technology Group). At Blackstone I was a principal member of the life science consulting practice and my biggest solo project was building and integrating the VAMPIRE cluster for Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

I left Blackstone Computing in December 2001 so that I could have more time to work on labor-of-love projects like the Open Bioinformatics Foundation. A secondary reason was that the cash-hungry VC's and investors ran the company into the ground by transforming it from a respected consulting shop into a wannabe software company with grand IPO plans.

In January 2002 I hooked up with several of my ex-Blackstone consulting collegues. We had been successful together as a team and wanted to continue working together. Thus, BioTeam was born.